Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Fred Block
Margaret R. Somers
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2014
CONTENTS
Preface
ix
44
73
98
114
150
193
218
Notes
241
Bibliography
253
Index
287
P R E FA C E
Preface
Preface
the Centennial Celebration of the life of Karl Polanyi in Budapest, sponsored by the Hungarian Academy of Arts and Sciences. At that occasion
Kari Polanyi-Levitt released the ashes of Karl Polanyi, and his wife, Ilona
Duczynska into the winds above the Danube. It was there that she and
Margie Mendell made public their plans for the forthcoming Karl Polanyi
Institute in Concordia. It would be impossible to acknowledge adequately
just how meaningful was the privilege of sharing in that experience.
For their generous readings and critical feedback on earlier drafts of
this volume, we would like to thank Elizabeth Anderson, Phineas Baxandall, Daniel Beland, John Bowman, Howard Brick, Rogers Brubaker,
Michael Burawoy, Leonardo Burlamaqui, Ayse Bursa, Craig Calhoun,
Michele Cangiani, Ana Celia Castro, Bill Domhoff, Phil Harvey, Donald Herzog, Alex Hicks, Larry Hirschhorn, Albert Hirschman, Dan
Hirschman, Arlie Hochschild, Jerry Jacobs, Don Kalb, Michael Katz, Ira
Katznelson, Michele Lamont, Bill Lazonick, C.K. Lee, Sandy Levitsky,
Kristin Luker, Mick Mann, Jeff Manza, David Matza, Mark Mizruchi,
Mary Nolan, Sean ORiain, Jamie Peck, Frances Fox Piven, Guenther
Roth, Bill Roy, Andrew Schrank, Gay Seidman, Eric Sheppard, Beverly Silver, Theda Skocpol, Brian Steensland, Marc Steinberg, Wolfgang
Streeck, Richard Swedberg, Ron Suny, Claus Thomasberger, Dan Tompkins, John Walton, Josh Whitford, Karl Widerquist, Erik Wright, Mayer
Zald, and Viviana Zelizer. We presented pieces of the book at NYUs
NYLON Workshop, UCLAs Comparative History Workshop, York
Universitys Social Theory Workshop, and various sessions of the American Sociological Association. We appreciate the thoughtful readings and
commentary provided by so many of the participants of these workshops and presentations. Finally, Greg Clark, Peter Lindert, and Norma
Landau at UC Davis and Tom Green at Michigan were extremely helpful
when we were immersed in the details of the Old Poor Law in England.
A number of students are also to be thanked for their research assistance, including Jane Rafferty, Claire Whitlinger, Dan Schimmerer, Dan
Samson, and Miguel Ruiz. We are also indebted to Leslie Ellen Jones for
her superb work in copyediting the manuscript.
Freds main institutional debt is to the Ford Foundation and specically to Leonardo Burlamaqui, who supported his research over the last
seven years. It would have been difficult to complete this manuscript
without Leonardos ongoing support for the project. Margaret would
like to acknowledge support over the years from the American Sociological Associations Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline; the
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T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
1
KARL POLANYI AND THE
POWER OF IDEAS
It was a little more than twenty years ago that the decades-long Cold
War between the United States and the Soviet Union ended. When the
Soviet Union collapsed, some analysts optimistically claimed that we had
reached the end of history because the institutions of Western societies
had denitively proven their superiority over all others (Fukuyama 1992).
Since then the United States has suffered the trauma of the September 11,
2001 terrorist attacks, fought extended wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and
has experienced the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Over this same twenty-year period, politics in the United States has
become ever more polarized, stalemated, and dysfunctional. From the
attempted impeachment of Bill Clinton, to the deceptions and manifest
incompetence of the George W. Bush Administration, to the excesses of the
Tea Party during the Obama Administration, the political system continues to careen out of control. Suffice it to say, the triumphalism expressed
when the Soviet Union collapsed is now only a distant memory.
Nonetheless, however ludicrous the end of history may sound to
us now, the proclamation cannot be dismissed as simply the hubris of
a handful of overly optimistic prognosticators. After all, very little in
contemporary social and economic theory prepared us for the multiple traumas of the last two decades. Economists were particularly complacent as they vigorously promoted the doctrine that deregulation,
labor exibility, tax cuts for the wealthy, and unfettered free markets
would produce unprecedented prosperity. In fact, the U.S. model was
held out as an example to others as a preferable alternative to both
the Eurosclerosis1 that allegedly plagued Continental Europe and the
crony capitalism that undermined the major Asian economies.
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There were, of course, some important exceptions to the celebratory mood. Starting in 2000, the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (2000, 2002, 2003) challenged the wisdom and sustainability of
the economic policies that Washington was urging on the rest of the
world. The nancier and philanthropist George Soros produced a series
of books (1998, 2000, 2002) questioning the arguments underlying the
spectacular growth of global nancial markets. John Gray (2000), the
British political theorist who had earlier been a supporter of Margaret Thatcher, questioned whether the bad Anglo-American version of
capitalism was undermining the stability of the more productive type of
capitalism that had ourished on the European Continent. And Mark
Blyth (2002), a Scottish born political scientist, questioned the dramatic
increase in wealth of the top 1% of households in the U.S. that resulted
from Reagan-era policies.
Many of these dissenters and skeptics explicitly drew inspiration from
the work of Karl Polanyi (18861964), a twentieth-century Hungarian
refugee intellectual and economic historian, whose most important book,
The Great Transformation (hereafter GT), was originally published in
1944.2 In that work, Polanyi sought to understand the historical forces
that had led to the Great War (World War I), the Great Depression of the
1930s, the New Deal, the rise of fascism, and the coming of World War II.
He develops what many consider to be the twentieth-centurys most powerful and systematic critique of free market ideas and practices, one that
has extraordinary relevance for understanding our own historical period.
Our project in this book is to show that Polanyis thought is as critical
as ever for making sense of the surprising political-economic developments of the past few decades and their contemporary social and economic consequences. Our focus is on the rebirth in the 1970s and 1980s
of the same free market ideas that were widely assumed to have died in
the Great Depression. Driven by this free market ideology, conservative politicians have engaged in a decades-long campaign to reverse the
reforms originally introduced in the 1930s by Franklin Roosevelts New
Deal and extended in the 1960s by Lyndon Johnsons Great Society programs. Those regulations and programs had placed severe restrictions
on speculative activity by nancial institutions, reduced the extreme
inequality of income and wealth distribution of the 1920s, provided
organized labor with a stable and recognized position in both the workplace and in the polity, and created protections for citizens from the
risks involved in becoming unemployed or growing old. Businessmen
and right-wing intellectuals had railed against these changes for many
T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
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Polanyi argues that in a complex society we cannot escape the necessity of politics and governmental coordination of economic and social
life. Utopian calls from either the right or the left to end politics as we
know it are likely only to end up expanding the scope of politics. But
this insight did not lead Polanyi to despair. While his eyes were open to
all of the ugliness of the political realm, he believed that an expansion
of political democracy was the only guarantee against both government
coercion and market tyranny. In the nal pages of GT, he lays out his
still-persuasive argument that recognizing the inevitability of politics and
political conicts could be the foundation for a society with a greater
degree of freedom than ever before: Uncomplaining acceptance of the
reality of society gives man indomitable courage and strength to remove
all removable injustices and unfreedom. As long as he is true to his task
of creating more abundant freedom for all, he need not fear that either
power or planning will turn against him and destroy the freedom he is
buiding by their instrumentality (GT, 268).
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it after the Napoleonic Wars. Other European nations gradually followed the English model and by the 1870s, it was the standard for developed nations and widely seen as a critical pillar of global prosperity.14
Polanyi argues that the triad of the self-regulating market, the liberal
state, and the gold standard were central to the growing prosperity of
nineteenth-century Europe. He insists, however, that these arrangements
represented a radical and dangerous break with previous institutional
patterns and set off countertrends that would ultimately lead to crisis
and war. His argument here is complex and multifaceted, but it is possible to trace out a few of the critical causal chains in his argument.
Polanyi argues rst and foremost that the goal of creating a self-regulating market and a liberal state is ultimately unachievablehence utopian. He states unequivocally on the rst page of the book: Our thesis
is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark Utopia. Such
an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating
the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically
destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness
(GT, 3). Our entire book could be seen as an extended effort to explicate
these two sentences.
Polanyis thesis can be illustrated through the experience of unemployed urban workers in market economies. Market economies go
through economic cycles that alternate periods of prosperity and high
demand for labor with periods of crisis and elevated unemployment.
What are the unemployed to do during these crisis periods when there
is no demand for their services? Free market economists advise that the
unemployed must adjust to the situation by accepting reduced wages.
But even the unemployed who hold up signs saying will work for food
usually nd little interest in their services during an economic downturn.
Absent unemployment insurance or other forms of welfare, these displaced workers and their families are at risk for starvation. If political
authorities were bound by laissez-faire principles during periods of mass
unemployment or failed harvests, there would be mass starvation.15 This
is what Polanyi means by such an institution could not exist for any
length of time without annihilating the human ... substance of society.
Under pressure from their citizens, even undemocratic governments had
little choice but to move away from strict laissez-faire principles during
the course of the nineteenth century.
This nineteenth-century resistance was part of Polanyis double
movement. The movement to impose laissez-faire on society generated
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goal of pursuing full employment for the worlds labor force. While the
Bretton Woods system was not fully operational until the late 1950s, the
new policy environment of xed exchange rates and strict regulation of
global capital ows facilitated full employment policies for almost three
decades after the end of World War II. This was the Golden Age when
both developed and developing nations experienced rapid economic
growth (Marglin and Schor, eds. 1990).
From the end of the 1960s through the beginning of the 1970s, the
Bretton Woods regime faced mounting strains, primarily because the
U.S. was unable to bring its balance of payments decit under control.
Under the weight of mounting problems, there was international agreement in 1973 to move from xed exchange rates to oating exchange
rates. While the proponents of oating rates had argued that market-determined exchange rates would adjust smoothly and gradually, the reality was the opposite. With exchange rates now shaped by the actions
of nancial traders and speculators, they became much more volatile
after 1973 (Krugman 1989). As exchange rate movements became more
pronounced, a growing number of governments dismantled controls
over international capital movements, producing even greater volatility
in both exchange rates and capital movements. During the course of
the next three decades, there was a spectacular increase in both foreign
exchange trading and in the growth of various derivative instruments
that were intended to allow investors to hedge against increasingly disruptive and unpredictable movements in exchange rates, interest rates,
and other variables that might impact their portfolios.
The cumulative impact of these post-1973 changes effectively undid
what had been attempted in the Bretton Woods agreements. In a world
of oating exchange rates and instantaneous movements of global capital, governments in developed countries lost much of the policy autonomy that they had gained in the Bretton Woods system. If a government
attempted to pursue expansionary policies to increase employment, it
would once again risk crippling outows of capital. Even Scandinavian social democracies that had aggressively pursued full employment
policies through the mid-1970s faced periods in which unemployment
was reported at 8%, 9%, or even higher. And from 2010 to 2012, as
recovery from the worst economic slowdown since the Great Depression was just getting underway, pressures from the global nancial
markets were forcing countries such as Greece, Portugal, and Spain
to pursue austerity policies that would ratchet up unemployment and
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leave more people unprotected from the economic impact of the global
economic downturn.
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reregulation, which had begun under Jimmy Carter. By the term reregulation, as we suggested earlier, we aim to push back against the belief that
the success of neoliberal ideology since the mid-1970s has been matched
by markets being increasingly freed from regulations and government
management. On the contrary, regulations did not go away; they simply
changed. Those that had previously been written to protect employees
or consumers were systematically rewritten to support business interests
and reduce previous restrictions on business practices. Similarly, the tax
code was rejiggered to shift the burden from high-income households to
middle class and working class earners.
Reagans reregulative policies started a dramatic shift of income in
favor of the top 1% of households (Hacker and Pierson 2010). As noted
earlier, the share of income going to the top 1% increased from 10%
in 1981 to 23.5% in 2007 (Saez and Piketty 2013). Much of this shift
can be traced to the bold new opportunities that Reaganite reregulation
created for Wall Street. Under the new rules, employment and prots in
the nancial sector grew spectacularly (Krippner 2011; Polanyi-Levitt
2013). Dozens of new billionaires suddenly appeared, who had built
their fortunes simply by making deals or trading pieces of paper including newly authorized derivatives such as credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations.
Moreover, this shift of income and wealth created a powerful feedback mechanism. Some of the new wealth owed back to Washington
to fund right wing think tanks and to nance the campaigns of marketoriented politicians in both parties. With learned studies coming from
these think tanks and the promise of more campaign funds, Congress
was eager for new rounds of free market reregulation. By the 1990s,
Republicans and Democrats alike were singing the praises of the free
market and celebrating the extraordinary energy and dynamism of the
nancial sector. In fact, it was during the Clinton Administration that
free market ideas moved from being a partisan weapon to becoming the
new ideational regime (Chapter 6). In the late 1990s, Clinton officials
such as Robert Rubin and Larry Summers were among the most enthusiastic celebrants of nancial markets that were growing rapidly and
allegedly regulating themselves.
To be sure, from the 1980s onward, almost every step of reregulation that eliminated previous restrictions on what nancial rms could
legally do was challenged by powerful voices who warned that the
new measures could well lead to a nancial disaster. Their warnings,
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Greenspan exemplies the point that when public officials take actions
that in retrospect appear wildly irrational, it usually is the case that they
are engaging in sober calculations based on mistaken premises derived
from theories of how the world works.19 The politicians and government
officials who so carelessly unwound an entire system of nancial regulations did so from their fealty to free market assumptions that unleashing
nance would pay off mightily. So foundational was this model in sculpting collective perceptions that nancial engineers, banking economists,
and politicians justied their actions by its authority. The model limited
their vision in such a way that made their choices appear to be rational
ones. They were, in short, both constrained and enabled by their ideas.
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City. But he did not believe in the system of ideas by which economists
lived, and still live; he did not worship at the temple; he was a heretic
who learned how to play the game (Skidelsky 2009, 5960). Skidelsky
insists that Keyness insights ... were nevercould never beproperly integrated into the core of his discipline, which expelled them as
soon as it conveniently could (Skidelsky 2009, 5556).
In a view that he shared with Karl Polanyi, John Maynard Keyness
unacceptable heresy was his belief that the economy was a means to an
end, not an end in itself. He had an abiding suspicion of crass materialism, of money-making, and especially of the love of money. Skidelsky
drives home this point by quoting a speech Keynes gave in Dublin in
1933, in which he said that the system of economic calculation made
... the whole conduct of life ... into a sort of parody of an accountants
nightmare. We destroy the beauty of the countryside because the unappropriated splendors of nature have no economic value. We are capable
of shutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend (146). In fact, by the end of the 1930s, Keynes (1982 [1939]:500)
explicitly argued for liberal socialism, despite his continuing rejection
of Marxist ideas. He wrote in The New Statesman and Nation: The
question is whether we are prepared to move out of the nineteenth century laissez-faire state into an era of liberal socialism, by which I mean
a system where we can act as an organized community for common
purposes and to promote social and economic justice, whilst respecting
and protecting the individualhis freedom of choice, his faith, his mind,
and its expression, his enterprise and his property.23 But no matter how
radical the prescriptions he offered, when Keynes put on the mask of
the economist, he conformed to the disciplines core assumption that
the economy is autonomous from other social institutions. In a word,
Keyness pragmatism and desire to inuence other economists meant
that he could not embrace Polanyis heretical view that actual market
economies are embedded in society. The irony, however, is that granting
the claim that the economy is autonomous set the stage for the successful
free market counterattack against Keyness inuence.
In their subsequent assault on Keynesianism, Milton Friedman and
his followers adopted the strategy of resurrecting the orthodox tenets
of Malthus and Ricardo. Because the economy is autonomous, they
asserted, it must be allowed to govern itself by its own laws. Since it is
autonomous, it must also be shielded from outside impositions such
as moral views that favor equality, social agendas, or the particular
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once the socialist revolution ended class exploitation. Polanyi sees this
claim as a parallel utopian fantasy to that of the self-regulating market.
Indeed, he explicitly follows Weber in recognizing that political authority and power would inevitably continue into any future social order,
especially as a countervailing source of power to that of the economy
(Polanyi, GT, ch. 13).
Two fundamental points follow. First, socialists could not ignore the
difficulties entailed in imposing democratic accountability on governmental power. Second, Marxists were guilty of imagining that a shift in
property relations wouldby itselfusher in a new and better society
(see Chapter 2). According to Polanyi, Marx mistakenly had accepted
the claims of the classical economists, especially Ricardo, that property
relations can and will determine the entire shape of the social order.
Polanyis view here is based on his unique insight that market society
was imposed in the nineteenth century through political means. What we
think of as modern capitalist society was, for Polanyi, not the result
of underlying inevitable economic mechanisms, but rather the consequence of a series of political choices and explicit government policies.
The pretense now stripped away of the economy as a force of nature,
it follows logically that these arrangements can be undone and reversed
through the same mechanismthe use of political power. While Polanyi
is usually not explicit on this point, his argument is consistent with those
who have argued that private property represents a bundle of different
rights that owners had at one particular moment in time (Berman 2006,
168).24 It follows that political and legal changes introduced over time
can change that bundle of rights until many of the most important structural inequalities in labor markets, capital markets, and product markets
are effectively eliminated.
For example, like Keynes and Harry Dexter White (Block 1977),
Polanyi argued that limiting the right of property owners to move capital across national boundaries would eliminate one of the most powerful
devices by which the wealthy are able to bypass democratic constraints
by forcing governments to pursue their own policy preferences. For
Polanyi, moreover, that markets and property rights are fundamentally
political constructs is an historical claim not just a theoretical one. In
GT he explains the history of the previous century as a series of partially
successful efforts to transform market relationships through political
means. So, for example, Bismarcks social welfare measures in the 1870s
not only provided workers with insurance against illness, disability, and
old age; they also transformed the labor market by politics. In the same
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way, trade unions winning rights on the shop oor politically reorganized class and property relationships (GT, 210217).
In sum, one of Polanyis most essential arguments concerns political democracy. Only a profound commitment to democratic practices
could assure that economic activity was constrained within a framework that meets the shared needs of the citizenry. Because he also recognized the importance of global institutions, Polanyi was convinced
that successful democratic governance at the local and the national level
required supportive global arrangements that worked in tandem. Subordinating the economy to democratic governance was for Polanyi a
global imperative.
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This substantivist view of the economy is grounded in Polanyis understanding that society and its institutions make up the foundation upon
which an economy is built. Aristotle insisted that humans are fundamentally political animals; they realize themselves only living in a polisa
political community. Polanyi would modify this and say that humans are
social animals; they dene and realize themselves in relation to others. It
is collectively through social arrangements that human beings work out
how they will secure their livelihood. It follows from this argument that
market exchange is only one of the institutional arrangements by which
humans organize economic activity (Polanyi 1968 [1957]).
Polanyi stressed the continuing role of three other institutional complexesredistribution, reciprocity, and householding. Redistribution
is the pattern in which goods are accumulated at a central point and
then distributed out to households. Reciprocity is the pattern associated
with gift-giving, through which items are passed along to others with
the expectation that the giver will also be a receiver. Householding is
the pattern in which families provide for their own needs. The role these
institutions play in modern society is invisible to those who focus only
on markets and processes of economizing.
These are the foundations for Polanyis profound rejection of what he
terms the economistic fallacythe belief that human society is fundamentally shaped by the needs of the economy. His view is that Western societies are as much shaped by culture as are tribal societies; it is
just that the content of our cultural beliefs now reect the core ideas of
Western liberalismbelief in the sovereignty of the self-interested, materially-motivated individual, and the sacred status we effectively attribute
to a rapidly developing economy (Sahlins 1976; Thomasberger 2013).
Just like any tribal individual who nds it difficult to think outside of the
framework provided by his or her own culture, we are ourselves prisoners of modernitys culture of the markets natural inviolability. The
consequence is that we understand ourselves and our social relationships
in ways that are radically incomplete.
Polanyi argues that, in the nineteenth century, Western societies came
to be organized in a way that made the pursuit of individual self-interest
appear to be the innate motivation of human nature. Yet, like Durkheim
(1964 [1893], 242), who emphasized the noncontractual bases of contract, Polanyi recognized that this utilitarian notion of self-interest was far
too brittle and socially corrosive to ever forge any kinds of deep solidarities (Somers 2008, ch.2). Were it to be an accurate description of the social
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and hostility between rival camps. At the same time, elected officials
must approve budgets and pass laws that bridge some of these fundamental disagreements, and the inevitable compromises that they make
frequently appear to be arbitrary and unprincipled. The political arena
routinely offends the sensibilities of ordinary citizens because it necessarily includes both actors who are excessively driven by principles and
those whose only principle is making whatever deals will advance their
own individual political careers. The market, by contrast, has been seen
as a rational haven from the passion-inamed world of political combat (Hirschman 1977).
The idea of ending politics has therefore long been deeply appealing. Polanyi argues that free market theorists especially promise a world
where politics would largely disappear because the states functions
would be radically restrained as the self-regulating market becomes
the central institution governing society. Threats to individual liberty
would be eliminated and we would be safe from those ugly conicts
and unprincipled politicians because the scope of governmental action
would be effectively limited.
Precisely because there is no such thing as an autonomous economy,
Polanyi denes this vision as utopian, and therefore impossible. But he
also emphasizes that the policy recommendations that are designed to
realize this utopia pose fundamental threats to society. On the one hand,
measures based on the unrealistic vision of self-regulating markets often
expose social groups to extreme hardship and the most dangerous forms
of social exclusion (see Somers 2008, chs. 2, 3). On the other, pursuing the free market utopia requires anti-democratic measures that limit
what citizens are able to accomplish in the political sphere. The ideal of
limited government means that citizens must not be allowed to expand
government spending for pensions and unemployment insurance if those
measures are seen as interfering with market self-regulation.
Polanyi recognizes that democracy is itself put at risk by such anti-democratic efforts to derail popular protective measures. He argues that the
fantasy of escaping from a world in which political power exists actually
paves the way for dictatorship. Vigorous democratic institutions are the
only way to protect ourselves from political tyranny. But those who
strive for a society organized around a self-regulating market are forced
to weaken democracy and limit the publics capacity to make its own
decisions. It is precisely those weakened and unresponsive democracies
that are most vulnerable to attack by extremist leaders bent on imposing
authoritarian solutions.
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Adopting the language of Albert Hirschman (1991), we label these arguments as the perversity thesis and explore its astonishing revival after
200 years of history. This presents a compelling puzzle: since we usually
assume that dominant ideas are those perceived to best make sense of
current issues, such continuity across vast swaths of time and space is
difficult to reconcile with the ways in which we think about the contextual importance of policy debates and inuential ideas.
A central aspect of Polanyis critique of the economistic fallacy is his
argument that the classical economists were mistaken or misleading in
both their understanding of human beings (ontology) and their theory
of knowledge (epistemology). Polanyi is explicit in arguing that these
mistakes were incorporated into the fabric of mainstream economics
and continued to have negative consequences well into the twentieth
century. GT draws attention to what we call the naturalistic fallacy
of classical political economythe belief that society is governed by the
same laws that govern nature and the physical world. We term this idea
social naturalism and show how important a role it plays in the initial
formulation of the perversity thesis in Malthuss famous Essay on the
Principle of Population.
In that essay, Malthus begins by asserting that human population
tends to grow geometrically while agricultural output grows only arithmetically, so societies are in constant danger of outgrowing the food
supply. This is precisely why, according to Malthus, poor relief is so
destructive; it encourages (incentivizes, in todays language) the poor to
have children even when they lack the resources to provide for their offspring through their own labor. The central moment in Malthuss argument comes when he proposes a thought experiment of what might
happen if the system of poor relief were eliminated from one day to the
next. He foretells that the poor would quickly see the folly of having
children that they are not able to provide for, and society would quickly
move back to the lost state of nature when those without resources
responsibly postponed sex and marriage until they had accumulated a
sufficient stake to provide for their children. At that point, population
and food supply would again be in balance.
But while Malthus is justly celebrated for placing the ratio of population growth to food supply on the agenda of the social sciences, his
reliance on social naturalism and the biological essence of human
beings makes this part of his argument highly problematic. While it is
true that human societies have long struggled with the balance between
resources and population growth, Malthus simply invokes an imaginary
state of nature and biology to solve the problem. Moreover, he ignores
the variety of social mechanisms that societies have used to manage population growth and to augment the supply of food. The reality is that the
reproductive practices of both the rich and the poor are also embedded
in social arrangements and are not governed directly by nature or by
economic incentives.
At the same time, that Malthus had to resort to a thought experiment
to clinch his argument against poor relief demonstrates the epistemological shortcomings of classical political economy. We term this approach
to knowledge theoretical realisma philosophical precept that rejects
empirical evidence as the primary condition for positive knowledge. It
instead uses theory to deduce that hidden forces and properties are the
causal mechanisms that underlie social processes that are the real foundations for knowledge. Malthus and Ricardo developed their theories
in the shadow of Newtons discovery of the unseen underlying laws of
motion that explained the movements of the planets. For the economists,
the market-induced balancing of supply and demand and the differential
growth of population and food supply were equivalent unobservable
laws that account for the natural movement of self-regulating markets
to equilibrium.
The critical difference between physics and economics, of course, is
that the stable trajectories of the planets can be observed and carefully
measured. Physics is indeed a science. By contrast, the assertion that there
is an underlying movement of self-regulating economies towards equilibrium is not based on empirical observation; it is simply a methodological axiom. Absent empirical evidence, however, their basic assumptions
about how economies work can be neither falsied nor conrmedthus
conveniently insulating them from standard social science scrutiny. No
matter; both classical political economy and modern economics are built
on top of this nonempirical as if axiom. Polanyis ideas help us to see
that particular market arrangements are not just socially and politically
embedded; they are also embedded in ideas, a phenomenon we dub ideational embeddedness. When free market advocates mount their arguments against welfare spending or for tax cuts that benet the wealthy,
they are seeking to embed economic practices within a worldview that
rests on social naturalism and theoretical realism.
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incentivize the rm to oversee the costly clinical trials that are a prerequisite for approval to market the new medication.
This is a great deal more than hypocrisyalthough it is that, to be
sure. More fundamentally, it is a denial of the fact that in all contemporary market societies, large corporations are always heavily dependent on government in a wide variety of ways. They need government
contracts, government help with their research and development efforts,
government protection of their intellectual property, government support when they run into problems overseas, and so on. But the business
sector also worries that this dependence makes it vulnerable to government pressure to accept policies and limitations on their actions that
they nd burdensome. In some places, and with varying degrees of intensity, rms deliberately embrace the ideology of the free market as a way
to push back and resist those initiatives of government that they do not
like. This strategy has been pursued with particular intensity by business
rms in the United States.
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stability and full employment, Federal Reserve Chairs usually focus single-mindedly on price stability and the smooth functioning of nancial
markets. They occasionally give lip service to the goal of full employment, but they are effectively insulated from the economic preferences
of the electorate.
But even this is not enough for free market intellectuals and activists. They also want to erect barriers so that taxes or spending cannot
be increased by simple democratic majorities. They advocate requiring
supermajorities, such as the two-thirds vote in both houses of the legislature that California required for approval of its state budget from 1933
to 2010 and which it still requires for increases in taxes. In fact, conservatives have been ghting for years for a Balanced Budget Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution that would prohibit even large majorities in the
Congress from authorizing any decit spending, unless the decit results
from tax cuts that benet the very rich. Similarly, free market theorists
have sought to erect higher barriers to the legislative enactment of regulations on business activity.
Polanyi saw this institutionalized distrust of democratic politics by
advocates of the free market as a profound threat to democracy. If the
political system is rigged so that the people cannot win the protections
from the market that they need, then they will turn against that system.
Indeed, this is precisely the dynamic that destroyed democracy in many
countries of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, Polanyis view was
that his free market antagonists in Vienna, Von Mises and Hayek, had
paved the way for the rise of fascism by preaching that popular preferences on economic matters should be ignored. In Polanyis view, the
way to preserve democratic institutions is to extend their inuence over
economic decisions. Precisely because he saw the autonomous economy
to be a ction, he had little concern that an expanded government role
in providing services and regulating private business would destroy
the market. On the contrary, his experience of municipal socialism in
Vienna had persuaded him that businesses could prosper in a polity that
was responsive to the needs of working people.
To be sure, Polanyi recognized that democratic institutions are inherently imperfect; voters will periodically elect people who promise things
that are neither possible nor desirable. But the solution to the problems
of democracy is more democracy, not less. Leaders who claim they will
deliver the unattainable can be voted out of office at the next election
or brought down by a parliamentary vote of no condence. Similarly,
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B E Y O N D T H E E C O N O M I S T I C FA L L A C Y
Karl Polanyis major contributions to the social sciences can be best understood by tracing the essential touchstones of his lifefrom his youth and
young adulthood in Budapests hothouse intellectual and political environment, his time as editor of an Austrian nancial newspaper, through
his difficult but life-transforming years in England, his brief time in Vermont, and then to Columbia University. After acquainting ourselves with
his remarkable life, this chapter explores Polanyis most widely recognized
contribution, The Great Transformation (hereafter referred to as GT).
We attempt to distill from his complex and sprawling historical writings some of his most important theoretical and methodological innovations. These include Polanyis foundational critique of the economistic
fallacythe tendency in Western thought to analyze all aspects of life
through an economic determinism. Polanyi countered this tendency by
emphasizing the primacy of the social, by which he meant that even
the mechanisms that societies adopt to secure the livelihood of their
members are socially constructed and heavily dependent on both political institutions and robust social relationships of community and civil
society. Through his criticism of the economistic fallacy, Polanyi also
made contributions to our understanding of how to conduct exemplary
historical and social analysis. Among the most important of these is his
demonstration that sufficiently rich and multifaceted social analysis can
only be accomplished by taking into account three distinct levels of analysis, levels that cannot be reduced to each other: 1) the global context in
which the society is situated, 2) the actions of states, and 3) the conicts
among social classes and other groups.
Although he wrote his masterpiece some seventy years ago, Polanyis
GT still commands our attention today because its story resonates so
44
Polanyis Life
There exists no full biography of Karl Polanyi, but such a project would
be worthy of the efforts of the most skillful intellectual historian.1
Polanyis life spans ve countries, he wrote in three languages, and he
was actively engaged in political events from the reform politics of preWorld War I Hungary to the North American peace movement of the
1960s. Together with his wife, Ilona Duczynska, his personal networks
included the major gures of the classical period of European communism to dissident Hungarian intellectuals active in the 1950s and 1960s.
To sort out the people and events that Polanyi inuenced, or was inuenced by, would require a broad canvas that encompasses many of the
central events and ideas of the twentieth century.
For our purposes, a brief glimpse at Polanyis life will have to sufce.2 He was born in Hungary in 1886 to a remarkable family. His
brother, Michael Polanyi, was internationally known rst as a scientist and then as a philosopher. Their father was a Hungarian Jew who
became wealthy as a builder of railroads. Polanyis Russian mother, a
strong intellectual, hosted a salon that became an intellectual center in
prewar Budapest. As a young man, Karl was a founder of the Galileo
Circle, a group of intellectuals committed to the liberating potential
of social science and planning in vigorous opposition to clericalism,
corruption, against the privileged, against bureaucracy-against the
morass that is ever-present and pervasive in this semi-feudal country
(Duczynska 1977, xi).
Polanyis ideas can be traced to the formative period of Hungarian
history from 1908 to 1918, when a generation of middle-class intellectuals was radicalized by the stagnation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
and ultimately by the barbarity of World War I. Polanyi was typical of
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participant in the Bla Kun regime, who had been forced to ee from the
White Terror that followed the revolutionary regimes collapse.
As the political situation in Vienna turned to the right in the early
1930s, Polanyi emigrated to England, where he eventually found a job
in worker education. In England he became associated with a group of
Christian Socialists and Quakers and collaborated with them on a book,
Christianity and the Social Revolution (1935). His own essay in that
book, The Essence of Fascism, pregured some of the arguments in GT
in pointing to how the corporatist fascist state reduced human beings to
mere products. In 1940, Polanyi was able to get an appointment at Bennington College in Vermont, where he crystallized his thoughts and wrote
GT, published in 1944. After the war, Polanyi was invited to Columbia to
teach economic history, a position that he retained until 1953, when he
retired to Toronto, Canada, to join Ilona, who had settled there because
anti-communist immigration statutes blocked her from settling in the U.S.
During the Columbia years and in Canada, Polanyis research shifted
from the history of market society to the analysis of archaic and primitive economies. A collaborative research project at Columbia led to the
publication of Trade and Markets in the Early Empires (1957). With the
exception of a number of essays, the rest of Polanyis work was published after his death in 1964. A research monograph, Dahomey and the
Slave Trade, was published in 1966, and in 1968, George Dalton collected a number of the published essays, chapters from the three books,
and some unpublished material in a volume called Primitive, Archaic,
and Modern Economies. Finally, in 1977, Harry Pearson published an
unnished manuscript, The Livelihood of Man, containing both general
material on Polanyis theory of society and economy and an extensive
analysis of ancient Greece.3
Polanyis interest in primitive and archaic economies grew directly out
of his analysis of nineteenth-century market society. In GT he demonstrates that the market played a subordinate role before the rise of capitalism and argues that previous scholarship, particularly of the ancient
world, had wrongly interpreted the role of markets in those societies
using anachronistic theoretical categories derived from modern capitalism. Despite his devastating criticism of a market-dominated society,
however, Polanyi was never interested in generating visions of a return to
a preindustrial past; his concern was to conceptualize and realize social
arrangements that would reconcile technology and human needs, freedom and social justice, markets and democracy. This commitment was
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rebuild the socialist analysis of market society from its very foundations.
This led him to reanalyze precapitalist societies and to reappropriate
such pre-Marxist theorists as Aristotle, Hegel, and Robert Owen. The
audacity and originality of Polanyis effort to reconstruct the socialist
critique of market society gives his work its lasting power.
GT is the account of the rise and fall of market society. There are
two critical transformations: the emergence of nineteenth-century market
society out of eighteenth-century mercantilism and the collapse of market
society in the twentieth century into fascism and world war. Polanyis
political purpose led him to analyze the second transformation more fully
than the rst, but there are lacunae in both analyses. Nevertheless, both
transformations were central to his understanding of large-scale historical change.
The book begins by demonstrating that Englands transition from a
commercialized mercantilist society to market society was neither inevitable nor the result of an evolutionary process. He challenges the prevailing wisdom that deemed nineteenth-century market society to have
emerged naturally from the preindustrial era with the steady expansion of market activity. Instead, Polanyi points out that while markets
became increasingly important in the sixteenth century, there was no
sign until the early nineteenth century of markets becoming the controlling forces of societies. Rather, the states determined regulation of
these markets, as well as of long-distance and local trade, consistently
limited their impact and prevented the creation of potentially threatening national markets (GT, 280285; see also Katznelson 1979; Somers
1993; 1994a).
In opposition to the familiar evolutionary view, Polanyi argues that the
emergence of national markets did not result from the gradual or natural
extension of local or long-distance trading. Instead, it was only when
mercantilist states began to see economic development as a foundation
for building national strength that they deliberately turned to creating
national markets as central to their state-building strategy.5 Even the
creation of national markets, however, fell short of the full development
of market society. This required a still more monumental societal disjuncturenature, money, and human beings had to be transformed into
the unnatural commodities of land, capital, and labor (GT, 7180).
In his discussion of Englands 1795 Speenhamland Act, Polanyi takes
up the most important of these transformations: for the purpose of buying and selling their labor in the market, human beings had to be turned
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mistaken from the start and dated from that century-old passion for a
self-regulating market. There was nothing more central for Polanyi
than these three points: that the ideology of economic liberalism was
pervasive and politically established, that it was fundamentally mistaken, and that it had become one of the main obstacles to the solution
of the problems of our civilization (1977, xvii).
To make this point persuasively, he also used Speenhamland to argue
that the effort to create a free market for labor was ultimately doomed to
failure because of the contradiction between arrangements that sought to
protect human communities and the wage system that made no adjustment for social needs. For Polanyi, labors commodication is the paradigm of market society; the attempt to transform human beings into
commodities is the core, and the core weakness, of market society. It
is the core weakness because no sooner was market society institutionalized than it catalyzed a powerful countermovement, which Polanyi
denes as collective efforts to protect society from the market. Precisely
because turning people into commodities represented such a fundamental threat to the fabric of early nineteenth-century society, it set in motion
an inevitable counterpressure for the protection of society. In contrast to
the calculated efforts of industrialists and state builders to create a market society, Polanyi argues that like all countermovements, these early
nineteenth-century ones were spontaneous, unplanned, and came from
all sectors of society in response to the devastating impact of the market.
Polanyi uses comparative historical analysis to show that, despite
the varying ideological congurations of the different European governments, all of them, including England, passed through a period of
laissez-faire, followed immediately by a period of legislative intervention designed to address the dominant social problems of the time. New
laws regulating public health, factory conditions, social insurance, trade
associations, public utilities, and so on all reected the essential contradictions of industrial development within a free-market system. Polanyi
describes the opposing principles of market society and the protectionist
countermovement in the following terms: The one was the principle
of economic liberalism, aiming at the establishment of a self-regulating
market, relying on the support of the trading classes, and using largely
laissez-faire and free trade as its methods; the other was the principle of
social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature as well
as productive organization, relying on the varying support of those most
immediately affected by the deleterious action of the market-primarily,
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but not exclusively, the working and the landed classes-and using protective legislation, restrictive associations, and other instruments of
intervention as its methods (GT, 138139).
Ironically, because the successive victories of these countermovements
effectively impaired the self-regulating markets and the unimpeded
supremacy of markets over people, even deeper economic disorders and
even stronger movements for protection inexorably followed. Behind
the backs of all concerned, these clashing processesall similar to the
contradictions of Speenhamlandgradually undermined the basis of
nineteenth-century stability, leading to World War I and the seemingly
sudden collapse of civilization. Sadly, the 1920s and 1930s only ushered
in another period of stalemate, during which a new order struggled to
be born.
While he does not mention it directly, Polanyis argument draws on
Keyness critique of classical economics. Because the classical economic
tradition is founded on the theory of the self-regulating market, it obviates any problem of insufficient demand; shifts in factor prices, including
the price of labor, will always restore equilibrium and high levels of
investment. But as Keynes (1925) insisted, working class organization
signicantly diminished the exibility of wages, so that the equilibrating mechanism no longer worked. Without that mechanism, investments
were likely to be withheld, and the problem of inadequate demand
became chronic. As a result, the progressive strengthening of the working
class from the 1830s to the 1920s served to diminish the curative powers
of periodic economic crises, leading to progressively more serious economic downturns. In the end, these culminated in the Great Depression
of the 1930s. Polanyi, like Keynes, criticizes those who deny that social
legislation and trade unions have interfered with the mobility of labor
and the exibility of wages, insisting that such a position implies that
those institutions have entirely failed in their purpose, which was exactly
that of interfering with the laws of supply and demand in respect to
human labor, and removing it from the orbit of the market (GT, 186).
Polanyis discussions of the protection of land and money are parallel to his discussion of labor. Drawing on the historical experience of
Germany, he argues that the major mechanisms for protecting the land
were agricultural tariffs that aided the peasantry by slowing competitive food imports. This, too, hampered the equilibrating mechanisms of
the self-regulating market, while also enhancing the political position of
those traditional social groupsthe old landed classes, the church, and
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countrya decision that Polanyi links to the crisis of the world economy. For Polanyi, it was self-evident that these diverse responses to the
crisis of market society could not coexist for long without war. Hence,
World War II was a direct outcome of the breakdown of market society.
Unless this lesson was fully understood, Polanyi believed that the postWorld War II period would be as disastrous as the interwar period.
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that are necessary for human group life. As with Durkheims emphasis on the noncontractual basis of contract, Polanyi saw that market
transactions depended on collective goods such as trust and regulation
that could not possibly be provided by market processes. For this reason, the protectionist countermovement was a necessary response to
the threatened destruction of society caused by the unregulated market.
The second concept that is shaped by Polanyis holism is the notion
of market society itself. For Polanyi, the distinction between the existence of markets in society and a market society is fundamental. The
followers of the economistic fallacy consistently jump from the fact that
markets existed in a particular society to the conclusion that the laws
of supply and demand operated as they do in contemporary society.
But Polanyi devoted much effort to showing that markets could operate
on very different principles. In many precapitalist societies, prices were
administratively set, so that supply and demand played a marginal role
at best. Moreover, even when price-making markets existed, as during
mercantilism, the systematic regulation of those markets meant that
markets played a subordinate role in social life. Hence, market society
was created only in the nineteenth century when these restrictions were
eliminated and land, labor, and money were treated as commodities. The
issue is not the existence of markets, but the relationship of markets to
the social whole. The category of market society is used only to describe
that social whole in which the market principle extends to and organizes
land, labor, and money and structures society around the ction that
these are true, not ctitious, commodities.
The concept of market society also has a spatial dimension for Polanyi.
Analysis of particular societies has to take place within the broadest relevant contextin this case, the global economy. Indeed, Polanyi was
among the rst to recognize that the international sphere was of critical
importance for understanding developments within particular nations.
But he approaches the international dimension as more than simply a
world market in which nations compete. He recognizes that on the international level, just as on the national level, market society requires an
institutional order to function. Unregulated and unstructured international economic competition would lead to a continuing state of war.
Thus, analysis of globalization requires a focus on the international economic regime that sets the rules within which competition takes place.
The gold standard system that plays a central role in the unfolding of his
story was such an international regime.
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In sum, social classes play a key historical role, but it is not a role
that can be understood in terms of economic self-interest (see Somers
1992, 1996, 1997). Finally, Polanyis theory of the state also reects
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his commitment to holism. As one would expect from his view of social
classes, he rejects the Marxist tendency to explain state policies in terms
of economic interests. Instead, he inclines toward a view of a universal
state that acts to preserve society by transcending particular conicts in
favor of the needs of society. However, there is more to Polanyis view
than this; paradoxically, the very success of the protectionist countermovement led directly to disaster. State action was not able to produce
the idealized outcome that one expects from such a universal conception
of the state.
This added complexity rests on the insight that the self-regulating
market created a peculiar situation in which development was caught
in the contradictory conict of two sets of general interests. On the
one hand, the working classes, landed classes, and others who pushed
for social protection were acting on behalf of social organization and
natural resources, and the state was responsive to their pressures. On
the other hand, the very market they were opposing, as oppressive as
it may have been, was now the material foundation of the society; survival of the new civilizationshaped and organized by market principlesdepended on the survival of the market. Market interests had also
become general interests and the state had little choice but to respond to
these interests as well.
Thereby, politicians acted in the interests of society as a whole when
they passed protective legislation, and yet the same was true when they
passed pro-market laws; the state clearly did not belong to either market or society. It was, rather, necessarily both universal, representing
society against the market, while also serving as a market-driven government. The state, in short, crystallized the nineteenth centurys fundamental struggle between market and society.
Polanyi analyzes political and governmental actions in terms of society as a whole, rather than of some particular interests. He is not theorizing here about government efforts to secure legitimacy from the
subjective perceptions of the citizenry. Polanyi is instead explaining how
an ever-expanding market so endangers basic social relationships and
institutions that the state is impelled to do whatever it takes to stabilize
economy and society.
Polanyis view of the state fundamentally conicts with market fundamentalisms appropriation of classical liberal political theory. While
political liberalism developed in opposition to a tyrannical English government and retained a fundamental suspicion toward political power,
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Polanyis method is to compare the different means by which different societies manage similar problems. This allows him to demonstrate
the hidden links between seemingly diverse phenomena. Redistribution,
reciprocity, and exchange are all comparable responses to the problem
of how societies congure their different institutions. From this point
of view, even fascism, the New Deal, and socialism are but different
national responses to the same problems brought on by the collapse of
the world market. In a sense, Polanyis procedure anticipates such later
classics as that of Barrington Moore (1966) and Alexander Gerschenkron (1962), both of which compare by asking how different societies
manage a particular problem, such as how to generate the savings necessary for industrialization. Polanyis institutional focus allows him to
distinguish arrangements that appear to be the same while comparing
those that do not at rst glance seem to be comparable.
A second important aspect of Polanyis method is his use of metaphor.
The most spectacular aspect of GT is its effort to explain the rise of fascism
in terms of how classical political economy and industrialism emerged
more than one hundred years earlier. This connection is expressed in
terms of a metaphor of organic misdevelopment: the ultimate collapse
of market society followed from fundamental strains that were inherent
in market society from the beginning. The acorn was awed, and that is
why the seemingly mighty oak of nineteenth-century society crashed so
dramatically and so suddenly. To be sure, when Polanyi expresses this
idea in his own languagethe collapse occurred because society had
to save itself from the marketthere is more than a hint of reication.
The abstract entity, society, appears to have a life of its own, which
acts against another abstract entity, the market. Measured against the
standards of contemporary scholarship, in which hypostasizing entities
and resorting to theories of organic development or misdevelopment are
often seen as cardinal sins, Polanyis argument appears at rst glance to
be seriously awed.
Yet such a view misses what is most powerful and useful in Polanyis
argument: the way he moves back and forth between metaphor and
metatheory, and a series of concrete causal arguments. In analyzing
large-scale historical change, using metaphors such as those of organic
development or misdevelopment is indispensable. The indispensability
does not rest on the fact that development is immanent in history, but
that the effort to make sense of large-scale historical change requires
frameworks that are able to link together a variety of concrete processes.
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Germany, as well as Japan and Italy, gained advantage from breaking with the nineteenth-century rules of the game before the rest of the
world had come to understand their obsolescence. Precisely this opportunity to experiment with economic autarchy and an aggressive foreign
policy gave fascist movements their power. While Polanyi insists that the
fascist impulse was international, it is logical that it should have fully
achieved state power in those dissatised powers that had the most reason to oppose the existing international rules of the game.
Hence, the three levels of analysis are linked by two different opportunity structures. First, there is a global opportunity structure that shapes
what is possible for particular governments. This set of constraints, in
turn, creates a national opportunity structure that inuences how social
groups or class forces can be most effective in inuencing state policy. This implicit framework leaves unresolved the critical question of
whether the opportunity structures are completely determining or if it
were possible, for example, in a period such as the 1920s for a more
imaginative working-class movement to have created new opportunities.
Still, this framework suggests a method by which the three levels of analysis can be managed without losing a sense of the analytic autonomy of
each level.
In fact, the opportunity structure argument is also helpful for understanding what motivated Polanyi to write GT, as well as in accounting
for the failure of his aspirations. GT was intended to be a primer for the
British workers whom Polanyi taught when he was a worker educator in
the 1930s. He believed that the end of the war would once again create
an open international opportunity structure and that Britain could be
particularly inuential in responding to that new structure. This in turn
would give the working class the opportunity to push Britain toward
democratic socialism and to break with the gold standard. Polanyi correctly perceived that such a move by Britain would have a major impact
on the European continent and through much of Africa and Asia. At the
same time, Polanyi assumed that the U.S. would continue on its New
Deal course.
This was where Polanyi was wrong. With the end of World War II
came an almost immediate intensication of the Cold War and the abandonment of the domestic reform project that Franklin Roosevelt had
launched. The U.S.s superior military and economic strength in turn
constrained the international opportunity structure and served to block
any impulses toward socialism or alternative international economic
Conclusion
Polanyi is unequivocal about his central concern in GTto explain the
destruction of nineteenth-century civilization and its giving way to fascism in the twentieth century. Against all alternatives, he insists that
the disintegration was a result of the protective measures that society
adopted in order not to be, in its turn, annihilated by the action of the
self-regulating market (GT, 249). Polanyi thus looks to the conictual
dynamics of social and economic institutions to explain both the construction and subsequent destruction of market society.
Polanyis institutional focus also leads directly to his conviction that
power and political governance are part of the elementary requirements
of any organized social life. He does not avoid the implications of this
position; for him, it is hopelessly wrongheaded to imagine that even an
idealized socialism would solve the problems of politics and bureaucracy. Politics and the state cannot just wither away. The achievement
of human freedom will require conscious action to restrain the necessary
but dangerous exercise of political power: The true answer to the threat
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of bureaucracy as a source of abuse of power is to create spheres of arbitrary freedom protected by unbreakable rules. For, however generously
devolution of power is practiced, there will be strengthening of power
at the center, and, therefore, danger to individual freedom (GT, 255).
What was most important for Polanyi was that society must overcome
the illusion that the difficult problems of human governance could be
solved either through the end of scarcity or the self-regulating market.
On the contrary, as he states in the nal passage of GT: As long as man
is true to his task of creating more abundant freedom for all, he need
not fear that either power or planning will turn against him and destroy
the freedom he is building by their instrumentality. This is the meaning
of freedom in a complex society; it gives us all the certainty we need
(GT, 268).
In a letter written to the love of his early youth in 1958, Polanyi,
after mentioning his martyrdom of isolation, suggests that one more
decadeand I would stand vindicated in my lifetime (1977, xx). In a
way, the remark was prophetic in that 1968 was the year of the May
events in France, of the Tet offensive in Vietnam, and of the most dramatic indications of crisis in the post-World War II international economic regime. Once again market society was under serious attack and
its central institutions were in crisis. Although these events conrmed
Polanyis diagnosis of the fragility of market society, it took several more
decades before Polanyis intellectual contribution began to receive the
recognition that it deserves.
3
KARL POLANYI AND THE WRITING OF
T H E G R E AT T R A N S F O R M AT I O N
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Moreover, Polanyi also kept his distance from the Marxism of the
Third International with its emphasis on revolutionary action. But the
story does not end there, as Polanyi had another encounter with Marxism.1 The precise timing is unclear, but there are clear traces of it in both
his published writings and in materials that are available in the Polanyi
archive at Concordia University in Montreal. A formative moment of
this encounter for Polanyi was his reading of Marxs Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, rst published in German in 1932.2 These were
the early or Paris manuscripts that the young Marx had written
in 1844 elaborating his theory of species being and alienation. When
these texts were nally translated into English and French in the 1950s,
they generated an intense debate about the relationship between the
young Marx of the Manuscripts and the mature Marx of Capital.
The French philosopher Louis Althusser famously claimed that there
was not continuity in Marxs thought, but rather that Marx made an
epistemological break between his earlier humanism and his mature
anti-humanism.
Ironically, Polanyis reading of Marx was almost the opposite of
Althussers; for Polanyi the humanism of the young Marx was the missing key to the mature Marx. In an essay published in 1938, Polanyi
wrote: The early works of Marx were often regarded as a mere preparation for Capital, and these writings on philosophy were therefore discounted. The idea was current that Marx had a philosophical period
before he branched off into economics, an interest which he put behind
him as soon as he came to years of discretion. This notion is entirely
erroneous. The philosophical presuppositions, without which Capital
could not have been written, are the actual content of the early writings
of Marx. His works up to 1847 were not wild oats of which he afterwards repented. During the forties, he laid the general human basis for
all his work (Polanyi 1938, 5).3
Polanyi read Marxs early writings against the backdrop of the Great
Depression and the rise of fascism. The collapse of global capitalism and
the fascist threat had a radicalizing impact on him as he struggled to
nd a way to defend democratic and humanistic values. As with other
radicalized intellectuals, Polanyi came to see a proletarian revolution as
the only viable alternative to fascism. Not ready to join any of the existing Leninist parties, however, during his stay in England in the 1930s
he worked instead with a succession of radical Christian groups that
allowed him to elaborate his own interpretation of Marx.
Polanyis position can best be understood in relation to the tradition
of Western Marxism. In the 1970s and after, scholars in Europe and
North America assembled the thinking and writing of heterodox leftwing intellectuals of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s who rescued Marxism
from the mechanical thinking of the Second and Third Internationals
(Howard and Klare, eds. 1972; Anderson 1976; Jones et al., eds. 1977;
Gouldner 1980). The key gures of what was to become a new tradition were Continental European thinkers including Georg Lukacs,
Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, and the writers of the
Frankfurt School. More recently, Michael Denning has argued that there
were important gures in the 1930s in the U.S. who also belong to this
tradition, including Kenneth Burke, Sidney Hook, and the Caribbean
theorist C.L.R. James (Denning 1997). Polanyis work in England in the
1930s ts squarely into this expanded tradition of Western Marxism.4
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power of the bourgeoisie. Once that class power was effectively broken
by a revolution that expropriated the Expropriators, they could condently predict the withering away of the state since there would no
longer be any need for institutionalized political coercion. Over the last
three or four decades, particularly in response to the failures of state
socialism, some working within the Marxist tradition have incorporated
the Weberian view that the core of state powerthe monopoly over
the legitimate use of force and the power to taxis autonomous from
class power.10 But this revisionist analysis is in conict with the way that
Marx and Engels dened the dividing line between the economic and
the political.
Signicantly, Polanyi in GT explicitly embraces the Weberian view; he
argues that power and compulsion are inevitable in a complex society:
No society is possible in which power and compulsion are absent, nor
a world in which force has no function. It was an illusion to assume a
society shaped by mans will and wish alone (GT, 266). Polanyi also
insists that justice requires that mechanisms exist to subject the power
of the state to democratic control (GT, 262265). But Polanyis analysis
of state power and of the relationship between politics and the economy
form a coherent whole. He is arguing that market societynot just at
its moment of formation, but continuouslydepends upon extra-economic political coercion. Or even more fundamentally, he is suggesting
that classical Marxism tends to exaggerate the contrast between feudalism and capitalism. In both types of society, the processes of extracting
surplus from the direct producers involve a complex mix of political,
cultural, and economic practices. In neither of these types of society is
there a separate economic realm.11
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He writes: The mechanism of the market was asserting itself and clamoring for its completion: human labor had to be made a commodity
(GT, 107). And yet, only a few pages before, we were told distinctly
that labor could never really be commodied; it is only a ctitious commodity. The rst argument is that Speenhamland blocked the full commodication of labor had caused a social disaster and simply had to
be repealed. But the second argument is that the full commodication
of labor would mean the destruction of society, and so steps had to be
taken immediately to protect people from exposure to market forces. In
short, how can the adoption of a mistaken and disastrous policy take on
the quality of inevitability?
The same tension between determinism and contingency appears in
Polanyis account of how the system of market self-regulation comes
into crisis in the last years of the nineteenth century. Polanyi is quite
explicit in challenging the views of von Mises and Lippman, who both
argued that a collectivist conspiracy crippled market society (GT,
148). They argued that starting in the 1870s and 1880s, various forms
of quasi-socialist legislation interfered with the mechanisms of market
self-regulation. Without the gradual and piecemeal adjustments required
by self-regulating markets, the system became prone to much deeper crises, including ultimately the depression of the 1930s. In one of his most
eloquent passages, Polanyi thrashes their collectivist conspiracy accusations. He shows there was instead a completely spontaneous effort
in a wide variety of different societies to protect farmers, workers, and
businesses from the corrosive impact of the market (GT, ch.12). The
difficulty was not with these protective measures, he demonstrates, but
with the intolerable costs that market self-regulation imposed on vast
numbers of people.
Yet in seeking to refute von Mises and Lippman, Polanyi seems to
embrace a key aspect of their argumentthat the various protective
measures did impair the ability of the market system to work effectively. His Chapter 17 is entitled Self-Regulation Impaired and it
begins: In the half century 18791929, Western societies developed
into closely-knit units, in which powerful disruptive strains were latent.
The more immediate source of this development was the impaired
self-regulation of market economy. Since society was made to conform
to the needs of the market mechanism, imperfections in the functioning of that mechanism created cumulative strains in the body social
(GT, 210).
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The next chapter includes this passage that could have been written
by one of his ideological opponents: Protectionism helped to transform
competitive markets into monopolistic ones. Less and less could markets be described as autonomous and automatic mechanisms of competing atoms. More and more were individuals replaced by associations,
men and capital united to noncompeting groups. Economic adjustment
became slow and difficult. The self-regulation of markets was gravely
hampered. Eventually, unadjusted price and cost structures prolonged
depressions, unadjusted equipment retarded the liquidation of unprotable investments, unadjusted price and income levels caused social tension (GT, 210).
These problems of adjustment set the stage for the inevitable collapse
of market society in the 1930s. Polanyi writes of the period after World
War I, By inherent necessity the root problems of market society reappeared: interventionism and currency. They became the center of politics in the twenties (GT, 239). The roots of the nal crisis were laid by
what Polanyi saw as a heroic but deeply misguided effort to restore the
systems capacity for self-regulation. He comments: Economic liberalism made a supreme bid to restore the self-regulation of the system by
eliminating all interventionist policies which interfered with the freedom
of markets for land, labor, and money. It undertook no less than to
solve, in an emergency, the secular problem involved in three fundamental principles of free trade, a free labor market, and a freely functioning
gold standard. It became, in effect the spearhead of a heroic attempt to
restore world trade, remove all avoidable hindrances to the mobility
of labor, and reconstruct stable exchanges (GT, 239). But as in earlier
moments, this utopian project could not be realized; the result was the
collapse of the global economy and its direct political consequencethe
rise of fascism. If ever there was a political movement that responded
to the needs of an objective situation and was not a result of fortuitous
causes it was fascism (GT, 245).
This argument about an inevitable crisis of market society has deep
Marxist echoes. The attempt to universalize the commodity form sets in
motion a powerful countertendency, just as Marx argued that capitalism
produced its own gravediggers in the form of the proletariat. The conict between tendency and countertendency creates deepening tensions
and conicts until a nal crisis leads to a radical break with the logic of
market society. But here again, this argument is in tension with Polanyis
insistence on the necessity of embeddedness and the inevitability of
hybrid forms. If a purely self-regulating market system is an impossibility, how could it be that the lack of purity inevitably produces a crisis?
It is not logical for Polanyi to claim both that a system of self-regulating markets was impossible and that any effort to constrain or limit market self-regulation was doomed to produce a systemic crisis. Fortunately,
he suggests a way out of this set of contradictions; it is that the crisis that
unfolds in the period from 18791929 occurs at a more specic institutional level than suggested either by Marxism or by von Mises and
Lippman. The problem lies not with the broad effort to combine market
self-regulation with various forms of protectionism, but rather with the
misguided effort to establish and maintain the international gold standard. The gold standard is the institutionalization of the abstract logic of
market self-regulation. It is the gold standard mechanism that is in contradiction with the various measures taken within nations to buffer their
people from market forces. When it is combined with multiple practices
that interfere with market logic, the result is deeply contradictory and
will inevitably produce a crisis. The implicit counterfactual that he suggests is that if international statesmen after World War I had decided
to discard the gold standard, they could have escaped the crisis of the
1930s. The problem, however, was that Belief in the gold standard was
the faith of the age (GT, 26). He goes on to argue that proponents of all
political ideologies shared the belief in the necessity of basing currencies
on gold: It would be hard to nd any divergence between utterances of
Hoover and Lenin, Churchill and Mussolini, on this point. Indeed, the
essentiality of the gold standard to the functioning of the international
economic system of the time was the one and only tenet common to men
of all nations and all classes, religious dominations, and social philosophies (GT, 26). But it is clear from the context that Polanyi considers
this shared tenet to be tragically mistaken.
In analyzing Polanyis argument here, we have the advantage of
another half century of historical development. The Bretton Woods
period, in particular, has taught us that the gold standard was only one
of a variety of international monetary regimes that are consistent with
a global market system (Eichengreen 1996). When Polanyi was writing,
however, it was far more difficult to disentangle the gold standard from
the global market. Even so, he was able to identify the gold standard as
one of the specic institutional pillars of nineteenth-century civilization
(GT, 3). This description of the gold standard as a distinct institutional
pillar means that Polanyi had assembled all the elements of the more
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specic and contingent analysis of the crisis of the 1930s. The core of
his argument is that the crisis was rooted not in the fact that self-regulation was impaired; the impairing of market self-regulation was inevitable. The problem was that the various forms of protection practiced by
nations coexisted with an international gold standard that rested on the
principle of market self-regulation. It was this incompatibility between
what was occurring within nations and what was occurring between
nations that created disaster.
This argument has particular relevance in the aftermath of the 2007
2008 global nancial crisis. The expansion of international capital
mobility over the last twenty years has recreated some of the same constraints that were characteristic of the nineteenth-century gold standard
(Greider 1997; Friedman 1999; Skidelsky 2009; Quiggin 2012 ). Nations
that offend the sensibilities of traders in the nancial markets can today
nd themselves subject to huge capital outows and intense speculative pressures against their currencies. Once again, these arrangements
are justied by the principle of market self-regulation. Within societies,
however, national governmentseven those in the most market-oriented
politiescontinue to play a central role in economic life by managing
the key ctitious commodities (land, labor, and money) and by engaging
in a wide variety of measures that protect people from market forces.
Hence, the same deep tensions between an international monetary system based on principles of market self-regulation and national policies
based on quite different practices characterize our own historical period.
The Speenhamland Problem
The last section suggests an alternative reading that addresses the
appearance of determinism in Polanyis account of the nal crisis of
market society. But the difficulties explicating Polanyis analysis of
the initial emergence of market society are even more daunting. When
Polanyi asserts the inevitability of the New Poor Law, he echoes the
Marxist account of the bourgeois revolution. The nascent capitalist
forms have emerged within the womb of the old society, but because
the existing property relations are holding them back, there is a period
of stalemate and crisis. It seems as if he is suggesting that sooner or
later the productive forces will inevitably break out and transform the
existing political system. In this sense, the coming of the New Poor Law
is for Polanyi playing a role similar to successful bourgeois revolution:
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from the market. And the result of these initiatives is a series of measures that shape and reshape how markets operate.
In Part II of GT, titled Self-Protection of Society, Polanyi elaborates a thick description of the diversity of means by which protection
restructures economic life in ways that limit and constrain the pursuit
of gain. His intent here is to introduce the idea that protection impairs
market self-regulation, so as to put in motion the contradictions that
produce both World War I and the Great Depression. But what actually
happens in these chapters is that Polanyi demonstrates persuasively that,
throughout the whole history of market society, the strength of protection effectively embeds the economy. He suggests that functioning market societies must maintain some threshold level of embeddedness or else
risk social and economic disaster. Polanyi shows that those advocating
protection were not only the opponents of market society; they included
its strongest adherents. In tracing out English history he states: Thus
even those who wished most ardently to free the state from all unnecessary duties, and whose whole philosophy demand the restriction of state
activities, could not but entrust the self-same state with the new powers,
organs, and instruments required for the establishment of laissez-faire
(GT, 147). A few pages later, he writes: It is highly signicant that
... consistent liberals from Lloyd George and Theodore Roosevelt to
Thurman Arnold and Walter Lippman subordinated laissez-faire to the
demand for a free competitive market; they pressed for regulation and
restrictions, for penal laws and compulsion, arguing as any collectivist
would that the freedom of contract was being abused by trade unions,
or corporations, whichever it was(GT, 155).
In short, competitive markets require ongoing state action. Part of
what Polanyi is describing here elicits Durkheims noncontractual bases
of contract, the set of legal rules and institutions required to formalize
property rights and contractual obligations (Durkheim 1964 [1893],
242). But Polanyis argument goes well beyond this because he also
shows how establishing labor, land, and money as ctitious commodities required new institutional structures. For labor, state initiatives to
embed the economy included the administrative apparatus of the New
Poor Law; Factory Acts that limited the exploitation of labor; an infrastructure of public health designed to protect the population from disease; and the development of an educational system to provide needed
skills. For land, the minimum conditions that Polanyi emphasizes
includes assuring a stable food supply at reasonable prices that, in turn,
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involved protecting the farming population from dramatic income uctuations that might drive them off the land. With money, much of the
infrastructure of embeddedness did not emerge until the last quarter of
the nineteenth century with the rise of central banks that stabilized the
banking system and smoothed the growth of the money supply. These
ongoing efforts to embed the market were often met with resistance and
by the opposing pressures of the movement for laissez-faire. Polanyi sees
market society as being shaped continuously by this double movement.
And although he emphasizes the irrationality and danger of the initiatives by market liberals, he also understands the extraordinary intensity
with which they are capable of pursuing their agenda in certain historical periods. In fact, one of his important political arguments is that the
resurgent market liberalism of the 1920s bears ultimate responsibility
for the rise of fascism. Writing of the 1920s, he argues: The stubbornness with which economic liberals, for a critical decade, had, in the service of deationary policies, supported authoritarian interventionism,
merely resulted in a decisive weakening of the democratic forces which
might otherwise have averted the fascist catastrophe (GT, 242).
With respect to the inconsistencies in Polanyis concept of embeddedness, we believe that it is in the chapters on the multiple forms of protection that Polanyi rst discovers the concept of the always-embedded
economythat market societies must construct elaborate rules and
institutional structures to limit the individual pursuit of gain or risk
degenerating into a Hobbesian war of all against all. In order to have the
benets of increased efficiency that are supposed to ow from market
competition, these societies must rst limit the pursuit of gain by assuring that not everything is for sale to the highest bidder. They must also
act to channel the energies of those economic actors motivated largely
by gain into a narrow range of legitimate activities. In sum, the economy
has to be embedded in law, politics, and morality.18
And yet, Polanyi is not able explicitly to give a name to his critical
discovery; he returns instead to the original architecture of his argument
in which this embedding of the market economy impairs the process of
market self-regulation. But even by the logic of his own argument, there
can never be a self-regulating market system, so the idea of impairing
its functioning is illogical. It is similar to saying that ones efforts to
capture a unicorn were impaired by the noisiness of those who came
along on the expedition. Here one can clearly see the tension between
the two arguments in Polanyis text. On the one side, the embedding of
the market economy is normal and necessary for it to achieve any degree
of functionality. On the other side is the argument that the protective
countermovement critically weakens the ability of market self-regulation
to function so as to produce crises of growing intensity. As we suggested
earlier, Polanyi does reconcile the normality of embeddedness with the
breakdown of the world economy when he emphasizes the incompatibility of the gold standard with the inevitable and necessary national
initiatives to embed economies within protective frameworks. Within
the architecture of the book, however, this argument is subordinated to
the idea that the protective countermovement impairs the functioning of
market self-regulation.
In summary, we are suggesting that although in the course of writing
GT, Polanyi discovers the idea of the always-embedded market economy, he does not yet name his discovery. He provides us with some
extremely important suggestions about how to carry out an analysis of
the always-embedded market economy, but he does not give us that systematic account. However, Polanyi lived for another two decades after
sending GT to the publisher; the obvious question is why he did not give
his new discovery a more systematic formulation in his later work.
Part of the answer has to do with the intensication of the Cold War
in the immediate years after World War II. Many of Polanyis hopes for
the postwar world were dashed by the intensifying conict between the
Soviet Union and the U.S. His 1947 essay, Our Obsolete Market Mentality, was one of his last public efforts in this period to inuence the
ow of events as he realized that his views were increasingly marginal
and irrelevant.19 Polanyi responded to the intolerant turn in American
politics and academic life by shifting his intellectual energies toward the
analysis of primitive and archaic economies rather than deepening his
arguments about market economies. Another possible answer is that
Polanyis briey glimpsed vision of the always-embedded market economy was linked to the specic historical moment formed by both the real
political and social achievements of Roosevelts New Deal, as well as the
anticipated social legislation of Englands Labour Government. During
that brief moment, it appeared that market societies could be fundamentally reshaped by deeply democratic reforms. The historical possibilities
were not obviously limited by the existing property arrangements. But
with the intensication of the Cold War, that historical moment passed.
In that highly polarized context, the idea of the always-embedded market economy appeared superuous.
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Conclusion
In his theory of the always-embedded market economy Polanyi has made
one of social sciences most signicant contributions.20 Indeed, that he
left it underdeveloped also makes it one of the most promising, as economic sociologists and other scholars continue to elaborate and develop
the critical concept. We have stressed here in particular the degree to
which the idea should make it hard to gloss over or hide the states fundamental role in shaping actually existing economies. Because the state
establishes the noncontractual bases of contract and is centrally involved
in constructing the markets for the ctitious commodities of land, labor,
and money, it becomes impossible to imagine how the economy would
run without its unnecessary meddling. Moreover, Polanyi also lays the
basis for understanding that tax policies, technology policies, competition policies, and trade policies are not incidentals, but fundamental to
structuring how different market societies operate.
We also emphasize that the always-embedded concept has a critical
cultural or ideational element, which in Chapter 6 we dub ideational
embeddedness. As Polanyi makes clear, human beings are not born with
Adam Smiths propensity to barter and trade. On the contrary, economic
actors have to be constructed; people have to learn how to behave in
particular market situations (Callon 1998).
Part of what Polanyi was trying to explain in GT was how the ideas of
market liberalism had sunk such deep roots into England, and by extension, the U.S. At the same time, he stressed that the ideas of the classical
economists had played a far less central role in the construction of market societies on the European continent. The same can also be said for
the building of market societies in East Asia (Wade 1990; Gao 1997).
Although there have been intense efforts in recent years to export the
Anglo-American ways of thinking about the economy to every corner of
the world, it would be a mistake to imagine that these missionaries of
economic orthodoxy will be uniformly successful in their efforts. It is far
more likely that we will see complex forms of syncretism that combine
older and newer beliefs.
Finally, the concept of the always-embedded economy suggests that
there are no inherent obstacles to restructuring market societies along
more democratic and egalitarian lines. After all, if it is not nature
but political discourses and institutions that drive our markets, then it
is those very same political dynamics that are ultimately vulnerable to
the power of democratic and egalitarian forces. The multiple ways that
business depends on state action provides a critical resource or lever
for seeking political change. Even those business interests that profess
to believe in the most extreme forms of laissez-faire doctrine need the
cooperation of the state, and this often disguised dependence can be
employed to renegotiate the legal underpinnings of market society.
It would, nonetheless, go against the spirit of Polanyi to think that
gaining signicant democratic or egalitarian reforms is ever easy; business interests and their conservative allies have formidable resources
with which to resist such changes. Polanyi reminds us, however, just
how contingent these resources are; they are not built into the essence of
the social system. Hence, although the rules of the international monetary regime, as with the nineteenth-century gold standard, often serve to
reinforce the power of business interests, these rules can also be changed
(as they were during the Bretton Woods era) to make resistance, at least
within developed countries, to egalitarian reforms more difficult.
Similarly, prevailing common sense about the economy tends to reinforce the power of business, but public ideas can be changed as they
were during the 1930s and, in some countries, during the 1960s. It is
thus possible to make systematic use of Polanyis insights in GT once
we have unpacked the text and shown the tensions between Polanyis
original architecture for the book and the new ideas that he developed
as he was writing. Most importantly, we can see that Polanyi glimpsed,
but was not able to name or elaborate, the idea of the always-embedded
market economy. It is this concept that promises new and deeper understandings of market societies, their crises, and their human consequences
in the early twenty-rst century.
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an end to political conicts and the exercise of political power. As Sheldon Wolin (1960) and others have noted, a deep hostility to politics led
socialist thinkers to imagine mistakenly that it was possible to escape the
necessity of governmental and political power.
One neglected aspect of Karl Polanyis thought is his showing the parallels between market liberalism and Marxism with respect to their utopian
views of state power. They both disdain it and imagine that it is possible to
escape from governance and political constraint, and they both prioritize
the economy as the central organizing force in society. To be sure, they
differ in their normative evaluation of the economy. Economic liberalism
celebrates the absolute freedom of unfettered markets as the means to
transform politics into a purely technical exercise of maintaining optimal
market conditions. Marxism, of course, associates the capitalist economy not with freedom for all but with unfreedom for most, even while it
upholds the redemptive powers of a stateless socialist economy.
There is certainly nothing novel about arguments that Marxism is
utopian. Where Polanyi is utterly original is in his startling claim that the
self-regulating marketthe central precept of free-market doctrineis a
utopian idea. A self-regulating market, according to Polanyi, has never
and will never exist, making its prescriptive demands for market governance wholly futile. Years before Hirschmans typology of conservative
rhetorics, Polanyi mobilized the rhetoric of futility against free-market
thinking.
A strong indication of the prescience of Polanyis rhetorical move was
that Friedrich Hayekarguably the thinker most central to the revival of
free-market ideas in the twentieth centuryopenly embraced utopianism
just a few years after the publication of The Great Transformation (hereafter GT). In a 1949 University of Chicago Law Review essay entitled The
Intellectuals and Socialism, Hayek proposed his own sociology of knowledge to explain why so many intellectuals had come to embrace socialism.
His argument is that, notwithstanding the impracticality of socialism:
... theirs has become the only explicit general philosophy of social policy held by a large group, the only system or theory which raises new
problems and opens new horizons, that they have succeeded in inspiring
the imagination of the intellectuals. Moreover, according to Hayek, the
socialists have been able to drive political debate continually to the left by
contrasting the status quo to the ideal world of the socialist utopia.
Hayek asserts of his fellow market liberals, What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as
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they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism
which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade
unions), which is not too severely practical, and which does not conne
itself to what appears today as politically possible. He goes on to say:
The main lesson which the true [market] liberal must learn from the
success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which
gained them the support of the intellectuals and therefore an inuence on
public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed
utterly remote (Hayek 1949, 432433.) So, in fact, Hayek and his colleagues proceeded through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to follow this
counsel and repackage market liberalism as a utopia. Rather than proposing mild and incremental reforms, they called for radical new measures
to overturn what they saw as the drift towards socialism. And just as
the socialist utopia had been grounded in a deep moral commitment to
equality, the market liberals rooted their utopia in constant appeals to
expanding personal liberty. And lo and behold, Hayek was vindicated;
free-market ideas made deep inroads among Western intellectuals.1
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to government such as providing social order and protecting individual liberty, all without exerting power. After all, if the natural and the
social world are organized by the same laws of nature, and these laws
are always preferable to the potential tyranny of arbitrary political will,
then not just the economic but also the governing functions of society
would be better served by the market.
For Polanyi, the idea of a society free of power is an impossible deceit;
it is based on the false claim that, in contrast to government, markets
and economic relationships are free of the exercise of power. It is utopian not merely because of the idea that society did not need political
power; rather it was in the conceit that the market, by contrast, is a site
free of power. To characterize it as such plainly reveals free-market utopianisms bias in favor of a denite kind of power.
Utopianism as a Planned Project
Classical political economy staked its appeal not only on the fanciful
utopianism of social naturalisms world without power. It also justied
its defense of a laissez-faire economy by telling a story about how the
historical development of the market economy in the nineteenth century was an entirely natural, spontaneous, and unplanned phenomenon:
Their [economic liberals] whole social philosophy hinges on the idea
that laissez-faire was a natural development (GT,148). Whereas markets as places of barter and exchange had long existed as elements of all
societies, Polanyis well-known argument is that these were historically
always embedded within and regulated by the larger system of social
relations. Nineteenth-century political economy claimed that the transformation of these isolated local markets into one big, national market
economy was the natural result of their innate tendencies to expand.
This was seen as the inevitable result of the even more basic instinctive
traits of human nature to barter and exchange.
Classical political economy insists that ever-expanding unregulated
markets are the natural condition of society, andwere they left to
ourish without interferencethe prosperity brought on by self-regulating market economies would be a constant of history. However, a
series of corruptions in the form of perverse political and legal interventions blocked this happy outcome. Examples include the efforts of the
Tudor monarchy to slow down the enclosure movement and the milder
but equally damaging laws restricting the movement of labor. History,
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according to this view, entails an epic battle on the part of social naturalists to undo the collectivist perversions of political power that interfere with the otherwise spontaneous and natural working of markets.
The eventual arrival of laissez-faire and a market economy in the early
nineteenth century was not an act of politics or law; it was rather the
belated restoration of the natural.
The reality is that political economy was a grand and calculated
scheme for the state to actively remake contained and regulated markets into a coordinated self-regulating market society. The irony of
this particular utopian scheme is that it violates the very essence of the
social naturalist ideal. Not only were laissez-faire and the free market not natural but planned; they were, as we discussed earlier, implemented through political interventions: ... laissez-faire economy was
the product of deliberate State action (GT, 147). Revealing the historical planning at the heart of the free-market utopia undermines both
its social naturalist self-representation and its mantle of spontaneity. It
also lays bare once again the hypocritical conceit at its core. The zealotry against the use of state power is selectively conceived and applied.
The self-regulating market abhorrs and challenges; when it comes to
aiding the poor. For the government to alleviate poverty articially is to
use power in the abuse of nature. But there is no hesitation whatsoever
to use powerful instruments of government coercion to create a new
legal regime that enforces the logic of markets. Polanyi thus disposes of
the ction that market economies are natural. The market fundamentalist world without power lives exclusively in the utopian ideology of
social naturalism.
Nor, moreover is political power a onetime exercise in jump-starting
a market economy, only to give way to the natural workings of the
market once it is nicely humming away. The market was never and can
never actually be disembedded. Political power is a constitutive element
at the heart of any functioning market; it can no more be removed than
can the price mechanism. The question is never whether the economy
is politically embedded, rather it is what kinds of political interventions are used and to whose benet do they operate. Polany argues that
despite the utopian ideals anti-statist zealotry, the irony is that political
power is the necessary mechanism to maintain and creatively adjust the
institutional conditions that maintain the appearance of a free-market: The introduction of free markets, far from doing away with the
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Utopianism as Tragedy
Even if utopian dreams are ultimately unrealizable (if a society is to
survive), Polanyi warns us that attempting to achieve the unachievable
nonetheless produces dystopian consequences. The horrors of early
industrialization included dark Satanic mills, children maimed and disgured from sixteen- to eighteen-hour workdays, and the squalor and
lth of early industrial cities. For instance, the misguided dream of economic liberals to restore the gold standard after World War I produced
a global depression that generated fascism and a second world war.
And the last thirty years of market fundamentalism has now produced
another dystopian global calamitya nearly catastrophic nancial
collapse and a global recession that has thrown millions out of work,
and increased hunger and misery in every corner of the globe. But how
does Polanyi connect these social tragedies to the utopian project? His
answer is not simply that the best laid plans will always have unexpected and unintended consequences. It is a more specic argument
that the particular utopian ideal of a self-regulating market society creates a dystopian nightmare. The key link is his conception of ctitious
commodities.
Polanyi argues that to create a self-regulating market economy, labor,
land, and money must all be subjected to market mechanisms. He calls
these the nucleus of a culture formed by human beings, their natural surroundings, and productive organizations (GT, 170). Labor and
land are no other than the human beings themselves of which every
society consists and the natural surroundings in which it exists. Since
commodities are things that are produced to be bought and sold on the
market, none of these three vital social entities are true commodities.
To include these ctitious commodities in the market mechanism means
to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market.
Polanyi argues that this theoretical sleight of hand places human society
at risk as it threatens to annihilate the human relationships on which
society rests.
Polanyi identies the noncontractual foundations of contract as necessary for both markets and for human communities to thrive. This
is because the humans who are expected to participate in markets are
incapable of performing any labor without a life-enhancing social environment and access to social and public goods such as clean air and
water, safe working conditions, education, and medical care. In its rush
to transform labor into a true commodity, however, market fundamentalism systematically undermines these noncontractual foundations on
which human society depends. The tragedy of this is most obvious in
the case of turning human beings into labor, which Polanyi says is only
another name for a human activity which goes with life itself (GT, 75).
In the early years of Englands Industrial Revolution, men, women,
and children were for the rst time treated as commodities subject only
to buying and selling on markets. To become commodities, they had to
be subjected to the free labor contract, which required they be ripped
away from their prior attachments to families, cultures, and communities. In discussing the process of early marketization in England, Polanyi
writes: [Marketization] was best served by the application of the principle of freedom of contract. In practice this meant that the noncontractual organizations of kinship, neighborhood, profession, and creed were
to be liquidated since they claimed the allegiance of the individual and
thus restricted his freedom. To represent this principle as one of noninterference, as economic liberals are wont to do, was merely the expression of an ingrained prejudice in favor of a denite kind of interference,
namely, such as would destroy noncontractual relations between individuals and prevent their spontaneous reformation (GT, 171).
When rural industry in southern England collapsed in the eighteenth
century, thousands of displaced workers were expected to simply relocate to another village, another city, another region, or even another
continent to nd work. Some economists argue that mass displacement
brought with it higher wages, thus making it uniformly advantageous
for the working class. Polanyi responds to this dubious claim by illustrating in grim detail that social livelihoods cannot be reduced to material quantication. The Industrial Revolution was a cultural catastrophe
that stripped people of the social and cultural supports on which they
relied: The human degradation of the laboring classes under early capitalism was the result of a social catastrophe not measurable in economic
terms (GT, 302). Indeed, he frequently makes the analogy between this
early English cultural catastrophe and the devastating consequences on
indigenous communities during the European colonization of Africa and
Asia: The catastrophe of the native community is a direct result of
the rapid and violent disruption of the basic institutions of the victim
(whether force is used in the process or not does not seem altogether
relevant). These institutions are disrupted by the very fact that a market
economy is forced upon an entirely differently organized community;
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labor and land are made into commodities, which, again, is only a short
formula for the liquidation of every and any cultural institution in an
organic society (GT, 167).
But even under less extreme circumstances, treating labor as a pure
commodity has tragic consequences. It strips people of protection from
the periodic bouts of unemployment that are an inevitable consequence
of the down phase of the business cycle. It leaves people hungry and
unable to feed their families while they wait for employers to once again
be interested in their services. And workers who are disabled or ill are
simply discarded like any other defective commodity.
Over the last thirty years of market fundamentalism in the United
States, the same undermining of noncontractualized social life has
occurred. Under the inuence of Milton Friedman, a conscious policy
of tax cutting has been a principle method of attack (Block 2009). This
strategy has been given a namestarving the beast. It is so dubbed
because, as tax cuts inexorably increase government decits, campaigns
are suddenly mobilized to balance budgets by waging ideological combat against excess spending. But once again, note the selectivity of the
anti-statism: the label of excess spending is applied only to social expenditures that support working and middle class people. In the U.S., where
the individual states provide many of the critically important protections
and public goods, this strategy has proved devastatingly effective. Even
after the election of Barack Obama indicated a shift in national mood,
state governmentsconstitutionally required to balance budgetshave
engaged in round after round of intense budgetary austerity (Somers
2008, 9395).
From a Polanyian perspective, the tragic consequences of nancial
commodication were also predictable. Although it was the nancial
elite and their political accomplices that pushed the economy over the
cliff, the Great Recession took its worst toll on the poor, the middle,
and the working classes as unemployment soared. Among the rich
Western countries, U.S. residents bear especially painful consequences,
as state governments one after the other have eliminated or drastically
reduced what little is left of the nations social safety net. Europeans, we
are reminded, do not lose their health care when they lose their jobs:
[Americans] nd themselves with essentially no support once their trivial unemployment check has fallen off. We [Americans] have nothing
underneath. When Americans lose their jobs, they fall into the abyss.
That does not happen in other advanced countries, it does not happen, I
want to say, in civilized countries (Krugman 2009a).
This is free-market utopianisms tragic denouement. When social institutions and public goods are defunded by governments, health, education, and personal safety become accessible only to those who can
pay. The result is the liquidation of a communitys noncontractual
foundations. The poor and minorities have long been subject to this kind
of strategic defunding of social support. Somers (2008, ch.2) recounts
the example of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,
a recent tragic demonstration of this process. She conceptualizes this
development as the contractualization of citizenship. Citizenship represents a bundle of rights and obligations, especially the rights to those
noncontractual supports necessary for full and equal social inclusion in
civil society (Marshall 1964 [1950]). These rights are the legal glue that
binds civil societys noncontractual foundations to its people. They are
the necessary elements for the essential freedoms and capabilities (Sen
1999) that people require to live as equal members of society. For all but
the wealthy, government-provided rights to protection against illness,
for access to education and literacy, for freedom from hunger and want
are the only hope for any semblance of true equality. When these rights
are contractualized, they become subject to the rules of quid pro quo
market exchange, rules that demand something of equivalent value to
be exchanged for full citizenship rights. They are thus no longer rights
but conditional privileges only available to those who have something to
exchange that the market deems of equivalent value, usually money or
labor (Somers 2008, ch.2).
Hurricane Katrina shows us what happens to those who have nothing of sufficient market value to exchange for what are no longer rights
but now privileges. The indifferent response to the social catastrophe
of government at all levels shows what happens to those communities
that lack the kind of resources that qualify as worthy of contractual
exchange. Quite simply, when rights to public goods dissolve, so too do
the rights to inclusion. People are literally cut loose from membership
in the broader civil society. Once excluded, they no longer are granted
the recognition by others as moral equals; they become superuous and
disposable. As we watched the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina unfold
over the course of days, weeks, now years, the status of the largely African-American impoverished population of New Orleans as a superuous
and disposable people was painfully and shamefully exhibited (Adams
2013). No social tableau has better publicized the tragic consequences
of commodifying human beings and contractualizing their noncontractual relationshipespecially that between government and the people.
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was that when the inevitable rush to safety by investors nally came,
virtually the entire nancial system faced insolvency. Only government
lending at a previously unimagined level averted a complete nancial
collapse (Skidelsky 2009; Wessel 2009).
In sum, free-market utopianisms effort to govern society by the laws
of supply and demand inevitably subverts necessary forms of social protection and embeddedness. Precisely for this reason, in the course of
the nineteenth century, institutions emerged to protect society from the
dangers of treating nature, labor, and money as if they were actually
true commodities. Critics of free-market utopianism understood that
government is the only institution capable of regulating the supply and
demand of these ctitious commodities. Policies were set in place that
allowed governments to manage shifting demands for employees by
providing relief in periods of unemployment, by educating and training
future workers, and by inuencing migration ows.3 With respect to
land and our natural environment, governments maintained continuity
of food production by insulating farmers from the pressures of uctuating harvests and volatile prices, and they regulated land use to avert
environmental destruction. And the rise of central banking was a deliberate effort to manage the supply of money and credit to moderate the
cycles of boom and bust.
In the late twentieth century, free-market utopianism undermined
the governments ability to manage and protect labor, land, and money.
By playing off the deep fears of government-induced unfreedom, it has
once again blinded us to the freedoms and human capabilities that only
government can ensure. As we discuss in Chapter 8, recognizing what
Polanyi calls the reality of society is our hope for societal repair.
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5
IN THE SHADOW OF SPEENHAMLAND
Karl Polanyi devoted two chapters (6 and 7) of The Great Transformation (hereafter GT) to an analysis of the Speenhamland Acta reference to late eighteenth-century English history that is often puzzling
for readers. Yet for two full centuries the Speenhamland story has had
a very real impact on social policy debates in England and the United
States. Moreover, over the last half century, even Polanyis interpretation
of Speenhamland has had a surprising impact on policy debates. One
striking incidence of this inuence occurred during the Nixon Administration, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan developed his Family Assistance
Plan. As Moynihan recalled:
In mid-April Martin Anderson, of [Arthur] Burnss staff, prepared A Short
History of a Family Security Systemin the form of excerpts on the history
of the Speenhamland system, the late eighteenth-century British scheme of
poor relief taken from Karl Polanyis The Great Transformation (Moynihan
1973, 179).
The gist of Andersons memo was that in that earlier historical case,
the intended oor under the income of poor families actually operated
as a ceiling on earned income, with the consequence that the poor were
further impoverished and even discouraged from seeking further work.
Anderson worried that Moynihans income oor might inadvertently
produce the same unintended consequence. Andersons memo was sufficiently powerful that Nixon asked Moynihan to investigate the accuracy
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the same terms that English critics of Speenhamland had used in the rst
decades of the nineteenth century. The parallels in these arguments have
been recognized by Albert Hirschman (1991) in his analysis of perversity as one of the three rhetorics of reaction. The core of the perversity thesis is that well-intentioned policies that provide assistance to the
poor by means of state intervention will inevitably harm the recipients
by substituting perverse incentives in place of market mechanisms that
teach the poor to work hard and exercise sexual restraint (Persky 1997;
Reekie 1998; see also Chapter 6).
A number of these conservative critics of AFDC were completely
self-conscious about the parallels between Speenhamland and AFDC.
The same Martin Anderson who wrote the memo in the Nixon White
House published Welfare (1978), which was one of the rst conservative scholarly attacks on AFDC. Anderson quoted Polanyis account of
Speenhamland at length to argue against both income guarantees and
programs like AFDC. In 1984, the neoconservative historian Gertrude
Himmelfarb published her inuential study The Idea of Poverty, in
which she carefully recounted the criticisms of the Speenhamland system advanced by Malthus, Burke, de Tocqueville, and others. Later on,
she published a series of articles and books (Himmelfarb 1994, 1995)
that explicitly drew the parallels between the dire consequences of
the English welfare system in the Speenhamland period and the negative consequences of AFDC. Marvin Olasky, a policy intellectual who
George W. Bush credited as the theorist of compassionate conservatism, published an inuential book called The Tragedy of American
Compassion (1992), whose title encapsulated his restatement of early
nineteenth-century critiques of Poor Law assistance. As we show in
Chapter 6, these self-conscious efforts to mobilize the perversity rhetoric
against AFDC had an appreciable effect on both elite and public opinion
and contributed to the passage in 1996 of the Personal Responsibility
and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) that ended the
long-standing entitlement of poor families to assistanceso much so
that it is fair to say that our recent welfare legislation was passed in the
shadow of Speenhamland (Weaver 2000).
It is common for social scientists to complain that public policy is
made with insufficient attention to history and social theory. In this
chapter, however, our argument is that for both discussions of guaranteed incomes and welfare policy, a particular and tendentious reading
of social history has been given far too much weight by policy makers
and policy intellectuals. This is particularly true in the case of the Speenhamland story because, over the past fty years, economic and social
historians have produced a large and impressive literature that has reanalyzed the English Poor Law in general and the Speenhamland period in
particular (Blaug 1963, 1964; Baugh 1975; Marshall 1985; Snell 1985;
Huzel 1989; Boyer 1990; Sokoll 1993; Lees 1998; King 2000). Yet most
of this literature is unknown to social scientists, and its ndings about
the Poor Law have had little impact on social policy debates.
In this chapter, we propose to rethink and retell the story of Speenhamland. This means, fundamentally, showing how the ndings of
recent studies in social and economic history undermine the Speenhamland narratives that have been deployed in social policy debates. But
this involves more than simply reporting other scholars results; we are
offering our own analyses of some of the important remaining puzzles in
this literature. Our ndings and analysis should also have bearing on the
history of social theory. While we are critical of Karl Polanyis history
of the Speenhamland episode, we are in fundamental agreement with
his insistence that classical political economy was deeply shaped by the
effort to explain the persistence of poverty in the Speenhamland epoch
(GT, ch.10; Procacci 1991). Specically, Malthus and Ricardo relied on
arguments about biological drives to explain human behavior, and the
resulting social naturalism became an important assumption behind
mainstream economics. We hope to build on that insight by unraveling
the naturalizing logic that critics of public assistance continue to invoke.
Moreover, we will offer our own alternative narrative that both makes
sense of recent historical ndings and helps to explain the centrality of
the Speenhamland story to classical political economy.
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was perceived by critics that all precedent had been violated by providing relief not just to the inrm, the aged, or the dependent, but also to
the able-bodied. These criticisms were further fueled by the dramatic
increase in local poor rates (taxes) and by the ndings of a series of
Parliamentary reports that played a considerable role in shaping public opinion.1 The most important of these was the Royal Commission
Report of 1834 that issued a devastating indictment of Speenhamland
and created irresistible pressure for the New Poor Law passed later in the
same year. Based on what we now know to be a nonsystematic and ideologically driven method of collecting answers to a survey questionnaire,
the published report conrmed what the commission had set out to document in the rst place (Blaug 1963, 1964; Finer 1972; Cowherd 1977;
Henriques 1979, ch.2; Marshall 1985). The main evidence mobilized in
the report was hundreds of stories from local parish officialsmostly
clergyconrming the immorality and degradation of the rural poor.
The report concluded that Speenhamland and the Old Poor Law more
generally were wrongheaded intrusions of state power into self-regulating labor markets. Poor relief created new and perverse incentives
that led to increasing pauperization. Exponential increases in childbirth
and illegitimacy, declining wages and productivity, assaults on public
morality and personal responsibility, and the development of a culture
of indolence were only some of the effects attributed to Speenhamland.
The Royal Commission Report was widely distributed, and it inuenced a broad range of scholars through the middle of the next century. In fact, until quite recently, the report was treated as one of the
important moments in the rise of the social sciencesone of the rst
times that a government body relied on systematic collection and analysis of data to analyze an important social problem. But a number
of scholars have persuasively shown that the Commissioners did very
little data analysis and simply used an elaborate structure of appendixes to give more weight to their ndings (Brundage 1978; Boyer
1990). Moreover, there was little in the commissions analysis that was
original; their narrative drew heavily on arguments that had been elaborated by Joseph Townsend and T.R. Malthus in the last part of the
eighteenth century.
Joseph Townsends Dissertation on the Poor Law (1971 [1786]) used
the fable of the dogs and goats on an island in the Pacic to make
its case against poor relief. Townsend argued that just as the populations of goats and dogs reached equilibrium as they each adjusted to the
changing food supply, so would the population of the human poor naturally reach equilibrium were it not for the articial intervention of poor
relief: Hunger will tame the ercest animals, it will teach decency and
civility, obedience and subjection, to the most perverse. In general it is
only hunger which can spur and goad them [the poor] on to labour; yet
our laws have said they shall never hunger (GT, 118). We have already
quoted Polanyis devastatingly incisive if pithy analysis: Hobbes had
argued the need for a despot because men were like beasts; Townsend
insisted that they were actually beasts and that, precisely for that reason,
only a minimum of government was required (GT, 119).
When the rst edition of Malthuss Essay on the Principle of Population was published in 1798, there was no mention of Townsends
pamphlet even though Malthuss argument followed along identical
lines. (Malthus did, however, cite Townsend in subsequent editions, after
being stung by accusations of plagiarism.) Malthuss argument began
from two postulates: First, That food is necessary to the existence of
man. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will
remain nearly in its present state (Malthus 1985 [1798], 70).
The identication of these two biological driveshunger and sexwas
the basis for Malthuss central claim that growth of human population
will inevitably outstrip the available food supply. Following Townsend,
Malthus argued that poor relief interferes with the self-regulating mechanisms that serve as the incentives necessary to drive the poor toward
self-disciplined behavior and reproductive prudence. These mechanisms
exist in the economy only in its untouched and natural statethe condition of scarcity. So, for example, when poor relief promises child allowances for those parents too poor to make ends meet, young people need
no longer delay marriage until they have adequate resources to support
a family. Since Malthus strenuously opposed birth control, his goal was
for the poor to postpone marriage. Precisely because every additional
child promises to produce additional income for the family, the existence
of poor relief encourages calculated childbearing as a more expedient
means of survival than disciplined productive labor. The consequence
is a rise of the birth rate that places an unwanted burden on the rest of
society that has to pay the bills.
Malthus also stressed a second line of criticismthat poor relief
undermined frugality, personal responsibility, and, above all, work discipline. Once again, the working premise is that the labor market depends
on a delicate self-regulating system in which a perfect equilibrium of
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supply and demand occurs only when it functions in its natural state
of scarcity. Remove the scarcity and gone is the spur to labor that only
the fear of hunger can provide; no longer will workers be interested in
pleasing their employers or in saving for the future. Measures designed
to diminish poverty end up making it worse: Hope and fear are the
springs of industry.... It is the part of a good politician to strengthen
these: but our laws weaken the one and destroy the other (Townsend
1971 [1786], 17).
For Malthus and those who followed his logicincluding the Royal
Commissionersthe specic rules for allocating poor relief were not
very important; as long as some of the able-bodied poor were eligible
for assistance, the negative dynamics were set in motion because people were being protected from the consequences of their own decisions.
Hence, supporters of this story tended to assimilate all forms of outdoor
relief to the able bodied under the single heading of the allowance system, and as long as per capita poor law outlays were high, they were
able to make their case that poor relief was making poverty worse.
Marx and Engels agreed with the conclusions of the Royal Commission Report, but they rejected its explanatory logic. They agreed that
the Poor Law had contributed to the immiseration of the rural poor, but
the crucial mechanism was that farmers had pushed wage levels down
by shifting costs on to the parish. Since a strapped employer might realistically only be able to pay eight shillings per week to an employee, the
parish would add four additional shillings to ensure that the workers
families would have enough bread. But now the employer, having caught
on to the dynamic, had a clear incentive to lower his own expenses
by paying just seven shillings the next week so that the parish would
increase its supplement to ve shillings.
It is not difficult to explain why Marx and Engels took this position on
the core dynamic of Speenhamland; widespread degradation of the rural
poor t the logic of their broad theory of capitalist development. Both
enclosures and the Poor Law were part of the process by which wealth
was extracted from the rural poor in order to help nance industrial
investment. Moreover, Marx and Engels saw the system of poor relief as
nothing more than a feudal remnant. However, Marx and Engels were
able to take this position because they were writing a decade or longer after the militant working-class protests that had been engendered
by the 1834 New Poor Law. Had they recognized the centrality of the
mobilization against the New Poor Law to the development of the working-class movement in England, they might have seen things differently
(Edsall, 1970; Rose 1970, 7894; Knott 1986; Driver 1993, ch.7).
They should have considered why industrial workers in the industrial
North of England cared so deeply about a mere feudal remnant. Their
failure to address this issue had unfortunate consequences. Given their
political and intellectual authority, the view that the Poor Law between
1795 and 1834 played a critical role in immiserating the rural working
class gained credibility that lasted for more than a century. Subsequent
historians writing from a perspective critical of capitalism followed their
lead. W. Hasbach, a scholar of the German Historical School, published
his important study in German in 1894 and in English translation in
1908 (1920). He was followed by J.L. and Barbara Hammond (1970
[1911]), Sidney and Beatrice Webb (1927), Polanyi (2001 [1944]), and
E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude (1968), all of whom concurred in
seeing the Poor Law as a factor in rural impoverishment.2
But it is not as though the Royal Commissions narrative completely
escaped criticism. It was denounced by the rural and urban poor who
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mobilized extensively against the 1834 New Poor Law, and Tory radical opinion allied with the poor in resisting both the dismal implications of Malthuss doctrine and the harshness of the 1834 bill (Hill
1929; Driver 1956; Ward 1962). Even J.R. McCulloch (1938 [1845],
290) an important classical economist, called into question the objectivity of the investigation. Criticism continued in the twentieth century in
R.H. Tawneys reference to that brilliant, inuential, and wildly unhistorical report (cited in Webb and Webb 1927, 84).
Ironically, the most elaborate criticism was offered by the Webbs in
Part II of their Poor Law History. The Webbs note that the Royal Commission was not an inquiry into the prevalence and cause of destitution: for the poverty of the poor was at that time deemed to be both
explained and justied by the current assumptions underlying the Malthusian Law of Population and the economists Theory of the Wage
Fund (Webb and Webb 1927, 83). In other words, the Commissioners neglected all structural sources of poverty because they had already
embraced theories that explained poverty by Malthusian and Ricardian
causesand prejudices: The active members of the Commission . . .
started with an overwhelming intellectual prepossession, and they made
only the very smallest effort to free their investigations and reports from
biasa defect in their work which is not to be excused merely because
we are to-day inclined to believe, as they were themselves complacently
assured, that their prepossessions against the Rate in Aid of Wages was
substantially right (Webb and Webb 1927, 8688).
Thus, despite their apparent criticism of the Commissioners hidden biases, their censure was overshadowed by their endorsement of
the reports foundational assumptionthat the allowance system set
up perverse disincentives to work that were profoundly destructive to
society and workers alike. In their admiration of the pseudo-scientism
of the reports presentation, moreover, the Webbs helped to perpetuate the image of the investigation as a genuine and exemplary work
of social science when they wrote of the commissions investigation:
Their voluminous reports, together with the equally voluminous other
statements, were printed in full, comprising altogether no fewer than
twenty-six folio volumes, containing in the aggregate over thirteen
thousand printed pages, all published during 18341835, being by far
the most extensive sociological survey that had at that date ever been
undertaken (Webb and Webb 1927, 54). All told, the Webbs ambiguous verdict helped the authority of the Royal Commission Report to
survive until the revisionist assault began with Mark Blaugs articles in
the 1960s (1963, 1964).
Polanyis Contribution
When Karl Polanyi began to explore the Speenhamland episode in the
1930s, virtually all of the historical sources available to him affirmed that
the Speenhamland episode had degraded the rural poor. Nevertheless,
Polanyi was determined to challenge the economic liberalsespecially
the Austrians von Mises and Hayekwho had demonized Speenhamland as preguring the state interventionism of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries that they so condemned. They claimed that all
efforts to use government to improve the life chances of the poor would
end up undermining the economys vitality and would ultimately hurt
the people that the policies had been intended to help. As a supporter of
the achievements of municipal socialism in Vienna, Polanyi (GT, 298
299) was determined to demonstrate the aws in the historical parallels
that these free market theorists had developed between Speenhamland
and Viennas extraordinary socialist experiment (see also Polanyi-Levitt
and Mendell 1987; Congdon 1990, 7884).
Polanyis strategy was to bring a greater degree of institutional specicity to the historical comparison. Instead of just discussing markets
and state action in the abstract, he sought to unpack the Speenhamland
episode by looking more closely at the actual workings of institutions.
His central argument was that the Speenhamland incident could not be
generalized to later cases of state action because it occurred before the
working class was capable of mobilizing to defend its own interests.
This was exemplied by the existence of the Anti-Combination Laws
that prohibited all trade union activity. Polanyi (GT, 85) is explicit that
had it not been for these laws, Speenhamlands aid-in-wages might well
have had the effect of raising wages instead of depressing them as it
actually did. But even more fundamental than the legal obstacles to
trade union activity was the fact that the complicated payment system
that Speenhamland initiated prevented rural workers from understanding their actual social position: Speenhamland prevented laborers from
developing into an economic class and thus deprived them of the only
means of staving off the fate to which they were doomed in the economic
mill (GT, 103). For Polanyi, then, the difference between Speenhamland and Vienna was that in the former case the workers had not been
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Divergent Narrative
As Table 5.1 shows, these various efforts to make sense of Speenhamland
shares similar conclusions about its ultimate impact on the rural poor.
Critics of capitalism saw a very different dynamic at work than that
identied by free market advocates, and Polanyi, in particular, added
another layer of institutional causality. The body of historical scholarship that has developed over the past fty years, however, should make
it difficult for any of these narratives to continue to be used to justify
social and political policy.
Complexities and Causal Gaps
Speenhamland begins to look very different when viewed in the context
of Englands long and unique Poor Law history (Solar 1995; Lindert
1998). Although initial practices date to the late thirteenth century,
the famous 1597 and 1601 Elizabethan Tudor statutes were the most
important pieces of English Poor Law legislation. The law established an
obligation at the local level to assist those who were impoverished as a
consequence of illness, inrmity, family breakdown, or temporary unemployment. There was much variation in actual Poor Law practices as parishes experimented with a variety of different policies designed to protect
the poor while maintaining work incentives (Marshall 1926; Webb and
Webb 1927). There was also considerable variation over time within parishes; efforts to nd the right policy mix at the local level sometimes produced alternating periods of generosity and stinginess (Thomson 1991).
Joseph Townsend
T.R. Malthus
Royal Commissioners
Ludwig von Mises
Marvin Olasky
Karl Polanyi
Cause
Proponents
Key Mechanism
Table 5.1
Outcome
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T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
Some degree of controversy over the Poor Laws existed from their
inception, but it was in the last years of the eighteenth century that
debate intensied with calls for the complete abolition of all outdooroutside the workhouserelief. Much of the blame for this shift
in attitudes is generally placed on the rapidly rising cost of maintaining
parish relief in this period. Per capita poor relief outlays are estimated to
have more than doubled between 1749 and 1801 (Lindert 1998). Considerable uncertainty about these rising expenditures remains to this day
because of the sheer empirical difficulty of understanding a highly decentralized system of social welfare in which critical decisions were made by
local parish officials. While we have data on the total Poor Law outlays
of fteen thousand parishes in England for selected years from 1802
to 1834, we do not know precisely how the expenditures were divided
among assistance to the vulnerable populationsthe elderly, the sick,
orphans, and unwed mothers; support for local poorhouses; and various
forms of outdoor relief, including assistance to the able-bodied poor.
In some parishes, detailed registries of all outlays have survived, but it
is often difficult for historians to reconstruct the particular rules under
which a specic individual was given six shillings each week. Even after
two centuries, historians have closely analyzed the surviving records of
a relatively small number of parishes (Huzel 1989; Sokoll 1993). There
were some periodic parliamentary surveys that sought to determine the
specics of local relief policies, but generally responses were received
from only a small fraction of all parishes, and it is difficult to know if the
responses are representative (Williams 1981).
It is clear, however, that the sharp rise in Poor Law expenditures was
largely a regional phenomenonconcentrated in southeastern England,
both the wheat-growing areas and the pastoral areas where both rural
and cottage industries were in decline.4 In the older cities, it is believed
that poor relief for the able bodied was rare, except for periods of acute
unemployment or abrupt increases in the price of bread.5 In the North,
the combination of sheep and cattle pasturage, a tradition of smallowner cottage industry, and rapidly growing urban industry meant that
per capita poor relief outlays were far lower than in the South (Somers
1993; King 2000). These regional differences were magnied by the
greater season variability in demand for labor that was characteristic
of the wheat-producing areas, especially as alternative income sources
began to dry up (Berg 1994; Valenze 1995).
But if we focus on the southeastern parts of England, there is a second dimension of empirical complexity. During the Speenhamland
Table 5.2
127
128
T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
(a) Wheat
Gloucester
Derby
55
100
50
90
45
80
40
70
35
60
30
50
25
40
20
35
15
(b) Barley
18459
18404
18359
18304
18259
18204
18159
18104
18059
18004
17959
17904
17859
17804
17759
17704
17659
17604
17559
17504
18459
18404
18359
18304
18259
18204
18159
18104
18059
18004
17959
17904
17859
17804
17759
17704
17659
17604
17559
17504
129
130
T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
others of the same sort in our stead (Royal Commission 1834, 223). A
similar sentiment toward such workers follows from Mr. Stephen Cadby
of Westbury, Wiltshire: The greatest evil, in my opinion, is the spirit
of laziness and insubordination that it creates; if you remonstrate with
these men, they abuse or injure, certain, however their conduct, they
shall receive their money (Royal Commission 1834, 223).
There may be truth to these complaints, but the obvious problem is
with structural unemployment that deprived so many of both meaningful work and social dignity. Moreover, there is little reason to credit
fears that the attitudes of the unemployed subverted the work discipline
of those who were regularly employed. It is much more logical to assume
that the sight of the roundsmen would serve to reinforce the regular
employees fear of unemployment. While they might very well sympathize with the plight of the roundsmen, they would not be eager to share
that fate. There is little reason to believe that poor productivity on the
part of make work laborers would subvert the productivity of those
who were still gainfully employed.7
A third gap in causal logic can be found in the assumption that
employers would deliberately lower wages to take advantage of the parishs guaranteed wage supplement. There are several serious problems
with this argument. First, we know that farmers competed with each
other to attract the most skilled and energetic employees, and there was
considerable employment turnover in this period (Kussmaul 1981; Snell
1985). Hence, even though trade unions were outlawed in this period,
there were still limits on what employers could do (Rule 1979; Dobson
1980; Rule and Wells 1988). Unilateral reductions in wage levelseven
if they were balanced by poor relief supplementsseem like a perfect
way to signal that a particular employer was seeking only lower quality
workers. Moreover, even if all the farmers in a given parish managed
to agree on a collective strategy to lower wages, they would still have
to worry that the better workers would defect to higher paying farms
in nearby parishes. This was a real threat because agricultural workers
were often in walking distance of employment opportunities in neighboring parishes so that they could change employers.
To be sure, employers were able to impose unilateral wage cuts in
periods of sharp economic downturn, but this was because employers experienced a general and simultaneous reduction in their need for
workers, and rising unemployment deprived workers of any bargaining
power. But in the absence of this kind of generalized downturn, there
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T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
133
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T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
was most elaborately spelled out in the famous 1563 Tudor Statute of
Articers (Tawney and Power, eds. 1924; Lipson 1943, 253; Tawney
1972 [1938]; Somers 1993, 1994a, 1995). Moreover, bread scales had
been used in years of high wheat prices at other times in the second half
of the eighteenth century (Henriques 1979; Neuman 1982).
Another misperception is the belief in Speenhamland as a continuous
forty-year policy with territorial and temporal uniformity. Mark Blaug
(1963, 1964) rst called this into question with pathbreaking research
that challenged the geographical uniformity of its application. Blaug
showed that the use of the bread scale was not geographically universal
even in wheat-growing areas. Neuman (1982, 160), in a sample of sixteen
parishes in Berkshire County itself, found none that used the Speenhamland scale in the whole period up to 1834. Poynter (1969), Baugh (1975),
Huzel (1989), Lees (1998), and King (2000) also stress the limited use
of the bread scale. Baugh suggests that it was much more common for
parishes to respond to years of very high grain prices by using poor relief
funds to purchase grain that was then redistributed to households. In
other parishes, the farmers sold wheat to their employees at below-market prices or, as had happened in earlier famine years, extra charitable
efforts by the rich provided some of the poor with food (Baugh 1975).
Even so, it is useful to think of the bread scales in certain parishes in
1795 and subsequent famine years as the rst Speenhamland episode.
In 1795, in 18021803, and still again in 1812, a conuence of several factors created the kind of calamity that forced many parishes to
take action. In each case, two bad harvests in a row coincided with
wartime limitations on agricultural imports from the Continent. The
dramatic and severe upward spike in the price of wheat that followed
placed this dietary staple well beyond the reach of most agricultural,
rural-industrial, and even urban working people. Moreover, as the poor
shifted their demand to coarser but cheaper grains, their prices spiraled
upwards as well. The consequence was severe distress and the outbreak
of food riots in which protesters seized grain from middlemen and bakers
(Wells 1988 see also Tilly 1995, 228232). In 1795, these riots occurred
against the backdrop of revolutionary events on the other side of the
English Channel, so that local elites had strong incentives to respond to
the threat of famine and revolutionary disorder. Despite the arguments
of Speenhamlands critics, the use of the bread scale was a very logical
method to respond to the threat of famine without permanently altering
wage rates or long-term relief patterns. (This is consistent with Sens
[1982] argument that famines are rooted not in an absolute shortage
135
136
T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
120
100
Index Numbers
80
60
40
20
0
1790
1795
1800
1805
1810 1815
Years
1820
1825
1830
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T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
of the size of the agricultural labor force between 1801 and 1831 in the
southeastern counties are little more than guesswork. Nonetheless, the
labor force seems to have grown substantially more slowly than either
wheat output or acreage. Wrigley (1986) estimates that for the whole
country, the number of adult males employed in agriculture increased
from 910,000 in 1811 to 981,000 in 1831growth of only about
8%. Since the wheat-growing counties were home to a large portion
of English farm workers, it is unlikely that labor force growth in these
counties was substantially faster than national growth. Given the doubling of wheat output between 1811 and 1834, there can be little doubt
that output per worker rose in this period. Overton (1996) suggests
quite substantial increases in labor productivity in agriculture across the
whole period from 1800 to 1850. Moreover, even Clark, who has been
most outspoken in criticizing the idea of a productivity-increasing agricultural revolution in the rst three decades of the nineteenth century,
acknowledges that labor productivity was either constant or increasing
slightly in this period (Clark 1991, 1999).
Since the available data on productivity in the wheat-growing regions
are sketchy at best, a number of analysts have supported the Speenhamland thesis by arguing that agricultural wages fell sharply in this period
and that it is reasonable to see wages as a reliable proxy for productivity. Inuential historians writing in the rst half of the century, such as
Hammond and Hammond (1970 [1911], ch.7) Webb and Webb (1927,
422423), and Mantoux (1962 [1928], 431439) have insisted that
wage levels fell dramatically during the Speenhamland period. However,
most of the available data series that we have that trace rural wages in
this period reveal the same basic pattern. Rural weekly wages for men
rise from 1790 through to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. There is
then a sharp decline during the agricultural depression, followed by a
recovery and a slightly rising trend from the early 1820s through to
1834. The rst systematic series on agricultural wages was developed
by Bowley at the end of the nineteenth century, and it rises from 53 in
1790 to 105 in 1812, then falls to 72 in 1824 before rising to 79 in 1834
(see Figure 5.2) (Mitchell and Deane 1962, 348). Eccleston found a similar pattern in ve Midland counties, and Richardson reports a parallel
pattern in wages on a large farm in Essex (Eccleston 1986; Richardson
1991). Clark (2001) has developed a series for weekly winter wages
in the southeastern counties based on various surviving estate records,
including those used by Richardson, and he nds the same pattern of
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T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
Instead of focusing on the wrong question, then, it is the Royal Commissioners claim that Speenhamland policies damaged rural productivity that must be scrutinized. The argument is already undermined by
evidence that the bread scale was neither pervasive nor continuous. It is
further weakened by both the data on agricultural output and the trends
in weekly wages that provide no support for a claimed collapse of rural
productivity.
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T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
In short, the family budget data provide a different angle of vision that
further undermines the conventional Speenhamland stories. Instead of
bread scales undermining work effort, we get a picture of a rural population facing broad structural forces that undermined their capacities
for self-support. In this context it is difficult to see increasing poor relief
as anything but a partial remedy to problems outside the control of the
rural poor.
A Revisionist Narrative
The strength of the evidence against the standard Speenhamland stories raises the obvious question of why the past fty years of historical
scholarship have not yet had any signicant impact on social policy discussions. There are undoubtedly multiple reasons, but two are especially
compelling. The rst is that the Malthusian foundation on which the
perversity thesis rests followed the logic of Newtonian physics. Just as
Newton explained the causal logic behind the fall of an apple not by the
simple appearance of things but by explicating the real, albeit hidden,
law of gravity, so Malthus explained the perverse consequences of poor
relief not by citing data but by invoking a hidden and constant causal
logic. By insisting that there was a deeper truth than that of empirical
appearances, Malthus effectively insulated his argument from empirical disconrmation.14 This is the reason the perversity thesis has been
so effortlessly recycled to analyze poverty populations who live under
radically different conditions than those of the Speenhamland epoch.
The second is that, since the revisionist work has been produced by a
theoretically diverse group of scholars, the ndings have not been organized into a coherent alternative account. As of yet, opponents of the
perversity thesis lack a compelling narrative structure.
It seems useful, therefore, to suggest an alternative narrative that
would place these new historical ndings into a framework that social
policy analysts might nd compelling. This alternative narrative centers
on the problems of legitimating the new science of political economy that
emerged out of the fundamental contributions of Malthus and Ricardo.
Malthus and Ricardo famously disagreed on some key theoretical and
policy issues, and later thinkers, such as Marx and Keynes, explicitly
embraced one while denigrating the other.15 But there was also much
agreement between the two gures, and ultimately it was Malthuss critique of the Poor Law that helped divert attention from the negative
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T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
145
146
T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
147
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T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
Conclusion
The major lesson that we learn from this study is a renewed appreciation
for the persuasive power of the metaphors of nature, natural laws, and
the science of political economy to inuence how history is experienced and why certain explanations for distress triumph over others.
The Malthusian morality tale about the perverse and disastrous consequences of Poor Relief was produced long before any evidence had
been gathered and too early for the Speenhamland decision to have produced its alleged consequences. In Malthuss 1798 Essay on Population,
all the elements of the story line are already in place. Poor relief, by ending the scarcity that is endemic to nature in its untouched state, destroys
the incentives both to work (in order to eat) and to control fertility, and
thus leads to a precipitous decline in productivity and a rapid growth of
the pauper populations. The only way to return the poor to their natural
state of self-discipline in both work and procreation is to abolish the
system of poor relief and return to the natural state of scarcity and the
human discipline it teaches.
In subsequent years, as political economy gained the privileged status of a recognized science, this story was repeated so frequently by
political economists, the clergy, and various Parliamentary commissions
that it gained the quality of truth. By the time the Royal Commission
was created in 1834, the newly reformed Parliament included a signicant number of factory owners determined to create an available, cheap,
and free labor force. The thesis was elevated to an absolute Scientic
Truth based entirely on the laws of nature. Despite volumes of literature
devoted to the subject, it took the next 130 years before there was a
serious scholarly effort to show the shallowness and distortions of that
document. But even after years of detailed scholarly work had effectively
debunked the Speenhamland legend, as we show in the next chapter, the
very same arguments were used to create support for the passage of the
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act in
the U.S. in 1996.
Our review of the historical evidence suggests two conclusions. First,
the perversity story lacks empirical support. The experience of the
Speenhamland period is that poor relief did not hurt the poor; it helped
to protect them from structural changes in the economy that had made
it far more difficult for people to earn a living. Second, the doubts that
have hung over guaranteed income proposals since Speenhamland lack
historical foundations. While it is theoretically possible that a oor under
incomes would be transformed into a ceiling, this certainly did not happen during the Speenhamland period, and there is little evidence that it
has ever happened. In fact, there are good reasons this theoretical possibility is rarely likely to occur in practice. In contrast to Speenhamland,
most contemporary income guarantee proposals, including variants on
the negative income tax, do not require that recipients work. Hence,
when employees are faced with an employer who is progressively lowering wages to take advantage of the income guarantee program, they are
likely to quit and look for alternative employment, since they know that
they will be protected by the income guarantee from economic hardship
during their period of unemployment. Moreover, under most circumstances, employers avoid unilateral reductions in wages precisely out
of the fear that they would drive away existing employees and make it
harder to ll vacancies. It seems only logical that if an income guarantee
were in place, employers would become even more cautious about imposing wage cuts.
Welfare and income maintenance policies need to be debated free of
the mythologies that were created two hundred years ago. Above all, we
need to move beyond the naturalized Malthusian accounts that see the
behavior of the poor as always determined by their biological drives.
Discarding naturalizing blinders and examining the actual situation of
the rural poor during the Speenhamland period, we are forced to recognize the central role of larger economic processes such as the severe
agricultural deation and the shift of industry to the North in explaining
mounting rural poverty. Relief payments actually provided some protection against these structural pressures. The contemporary lesson is obvious; it is time to reject the ideological claim that the best way to ght
poverty is by imposing increasingly stringent conditions on ever-shrinking transfer payments to poor households.
149
6
F R O M P O V E R T Y T O P E RV E R S I T Y
Over the past thirty years market fundamentalism has moved from the
margins of debate to become the dominant policy perspective across
the global economy (Bourdieu 1998; Campbell and Pedersen, eds.
2001; Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb 2002; Stiglitz 2002). As we discussed in Chapter 1, the term was popularized by George Soros (1998;
2000) to capture the religious-like certitude of those who believe in a
sacred imperative to organize all dimensions of social life according to
market principles. Market fundamentalism is the contemporary form
of what Polanyi (GT, 3) identied six decades ago as economic liberalisms stark Utopia and what we call free-market utopianismthe
idea that a market society should be created by subordinating all
aspects of social life to a system of self-regulating markets.
Social scientists have been surprised by the extraordinary revival
of market fundamentalism, which was widely assumed to have died
off in the Great Depression of the 1930s. They have had difficulty in
explaining its phoenix-like revival. The normal tools of comparative
analysis have provided relatively little leverage. Since market fundamentalisms inuence depends on global networks, one cannot proceed
with comparisons as though each national case is fully independent
of the others. Moreover, since no nation could risk following market
fundamentalist precepts to the letter, it is difficult even to produce a
persuasive indicator of the relative inuence of the doctrine in different
societies.
150
Even among those who have chosen to engage this difficult terrain, the
situation has been further complicated by explanatory disagreements.
Some analysts attribute the return of market fundamentalism entirely
to structural changes such as the growing integration of global markets
(Callinicos 2001; Friedman 1999). Polity-centered institutionalists have
been skeptical about the doctrines actual implementation, especially in
societies that are characterized by varieties of capitalism that differ
from the Anglo-American model (Pierson 1994; Hall and Soskice, eds.
2001; Huber and Stephens 2001; Yamamura and Streeck, eds. 2003).
Others have traced market fundamentalisms inuence to the enormous
investments its supporters have made in propagating their ideas through
think tanks, journals, and policy networks (George 1997; Himmelstein
1990; OConnor 2001; Piven and Cloward 1997; Williams 1996).
As readers of this volume know well by now, we are sympathetic to
this emphasis on ideas. Our focus, however, is on that which has been
little addressed, namely the causal mechanisms that allow certain ideas
to exert extraordinary political inuence. Haunted by the specter of idealism, social scientists have been wary of attributing causal power to
ideas. But if we are to be relevant in todays world, we must both recognize and explain how market fundamentalist ideas have so radically
transformed our dominant knowledge culture.1
We bring a new analytic strategy to this challenge. Using comparative
historical methodology we compare two welfare revolutions. Our rst
case is the 1996 American Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). The PRWORA is an especially
compelling case because a comparable overturning of an existing welfare regime by a market-driven one has occurred only one other time in
Anglo-American history.2 This was in 1834 when Englands infamous
Poor Law Amendment Act, or The New Poor Law (NPL) demolished the centuries-old welfare system of the Old Poor Law (OPL) and
replaced it with a radically different system, as we discussed in Chapter
5. In comparing these two cases, our goal is not to explain the nuts and
bolts of the Congressional legislative process. Rather, we aim to explain
the change in the dominant policy ideas made possible by market fundamentalisms triumph over the previously established ones.
The two cases have several striking similarities. Each episode began at
a moment of extraordinary national crisis and social turmoil that led to
increased welfare benets. There followed prolonged periods of political attacks against the existing welfare systems, culminating in sudden
151
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T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
0.7
pounds per capita
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
1749 1776 1783
$100.00
$90.00
$80.00
$70.00
$60.00
$50.00
$40.00
$30.00
$20.00
$10.00
$1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010
Figure 6.2: United States Benets per Capita
Source: Population data are from the Statistical Abstract of the United States; cash assistance gures
are reported in House Ways and Means Committee, Green Book, 2012, Additional Tables and Figures,
Table 73. Available at http://greenbook.waysandmeans.house.gov/sites/greenbook.waysandmeans.
house.gov/les/2012/documents/Table%2073%20TANF_0.pdf. Under the 1996 legislation, states are
allowed to use their block grant funds for a variety of different forms of assistance; the gures used
here are the state and federal funds that were used to provide actual cash assistance to families.
Table 6.1
United States
Timing
Ideas
Market fundamentalism;
perverse consequences of
providing welfare
Political System
Beneciaries
Administration
Similarities
Differences
England
United
States
Laziness
Illegitimacy
Degradation
155
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T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
157
158
T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
challenging upstart idea has to take the form of a more powerful public
narrative that retells the story of the nations meaning, morality, and
place in the ow of history (Glasman 1996; Lakoff 1996).
This is a high bar, one that only a set of ideas with enormous epistemic
privilege could successfully scale. To understand how the perversity thesis exercises such power requires deepening Hirschmans analysis of the
rhetoric of perversity, which turns out to be only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Below the surface, there is a three-dimensional epistemological infrastructure made up of social naturalism, theoretical realism, and
a conversion narrative.
In the analysis that follows, we show how these three factors equipped
the perversity thesis with the epistemological bootstraps needed to meet
all of the above conditions and to be a causal mechanism in both cases
of ideational regime change from poverty to perversity. To change the
public understanding of poverty from the fault of the economy to the
fault of the poor required the authority of new poverty knowledge
(OConnor 2001).
159
160
T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
161
162
T H E P O W E R O F M A R K E T F U N D A M E N TA L I S M
1601 Poor Laws (Minchinton 1972; Palmer 1993; Somers 1993, 1994,
1995). Indeed most of Speenhamland was continuous with the past. In
contrast to modern social policy, Speenhamland and the old Poor Law
alike did not make moral or practical distinctions among those in need,
whether they were employed, unemployed, underemployed, or unemployable (Furniss 1920). Rather than representing a separate poverty
policy, the Old Poor Laws made work, poverty, and economic displacement all matters for a broad Code of Labor (Marshall 1985; Somers
1993, 1994).
The source of these principles was the centuries-old denition of the
poor as everyone other than the idle rich. They were poor precisely
because they had no choice but to work. This conception of the poor
was coupled with the rst foundational precept of mercantilismthat
People are the Wealth of a Nation. Hence, the purpose of poor relief
was to maintain the nations source of national wealth (Appleby 1978;
Furniss 1920; Wilson 1969). With economic growth contingent upon
the miraculous Power of Industry, mercantilist writings overowed
with admonitions to protect by any means the working capacity of the
laboring poor. The second mercantilist tenet was the populationist
belief that national wealth depended on an ever-increasing population
of working people. Policies thus encouraged nding steady work for
those without employment, attracting more foreign workers, and providing incentives to the poor to marry and have children without the
nineteenth-century indictment of childbirth among the poor as an irresponsible tax burden (Appleby 1978).
Even with these strong tenets, mercantilist policy was surprisingly
problem-drivenits policies were conceived as rational solutions to
urgent public crises (Coleman 1969, 1980; Schmoller 1989 [1897];
Wilson 1969). We describe this empirically driven ideational regime as
institutional pragmatisminstitutional because it understood labor
markets and society as a whole to be rule-driven rather than natural;
pragmatic because it was problem-driven rather than ideologically teleological. Mercantilisms pragmatism was expressed through its decentralized structures of implementation (Wrightson 2000). National markets
were still underdeveloped and prices regionally varied, making it simply
practical for local authorities to have maximum discretion and exibility in determining levels of assistance and necessary rates of taxation
(Heckscher 1955 [1935]; Webb and Webb 1927). Decentralized and
discretionary policies made it possible for local authorities to assess the
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rationalist belief that political intervention could alleviate social problems, he declared that scarcity combined with population growth make
poverty, distress, and famine inexorable. To explain why the law of population did not wipe out humanity eons ago, Malthus introduces positive population checks.10 War, famine, pestilence, infant mortality, are
just a few of the ways nature successfully cuts the population to t scarcitys Procrustean bed. Ironically, this argument reveals Malthuss own
utopianism. Despite natures terrors and its endless struggles for scarce
resources, when left to its own devices, it creates a perfect balance of
supply and demand. When humans nally abandon the folly and futility
of trying to impose their own will over nature, they will nd that while
not always benign, nature is always a wise governor.
From the law of population, Malthus turns to the Poor Laws: To remedy the frequent distresses of the poor, laws to enforce their relief have
been instituted ... But it is to be feared that ... [they have] spread the
general evil over a much larger surface (1992 [1803], 89). The Poor Laws
of England tend to depress the general condition of the poor in these
... ways. Their rst obvious tendency is to increase population without
increasing the food for its support. A poor man may marry with little or
no prospect of being able to support a family. They may be said, therefore, to create the poor which they maintain; and as the provisions of the
country must, in consequence of the increased population, be distributed
to every man in smaller proportions, it is evident that the labour of those
who are not supported by parish assistance will purchase a smaller quantity of provisions than before, and consequently more of them must be
driven to apply for assistance. (1992 [1803], 100, italics added).
In this famous formulation, Malthus argues that the very measures
intended to help the poor inevitably make them poorer. Scarcity alone
creates a balance between available resources and the number of people
competing to consume them. Try to cure poverty by alleviating scarcity and natures disciplinary power over population growth will dissolve. With the Poor Laws perverse incentives to depend on the parish
for family allowances, the self-interested poor marry younger and have
more children. Most destructive of all, what should be a scarcity-driven
incentive to self-sufficiency through labor instead turns into a culture of
entitlement. Morality is corrupted as the poor are robbed of their own
independence. Dependence sets in as a permanent feature of life, and
with it ever-expanding levels of irresponsible sexuality, sloth, and moral
degradation. Ultimately, there is no choice but to recognize that individual behavior is to blame for its own distress.11
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The result was a clash of warring principlespragmatic institutionalism versus Malthuss perversity thesis. One was the prevailing ideational regime, the other aspired for the position. It is today hard to
comprehend the infamy, notoriety, and contempt that Malthus inspired
not only in the rst decades of the nineteenth century but for generations to come (Himmelfarb 1984; Winch 1996). The erceness, rancor,
and breadth of the controversy initiated by Malthuss Essay are equally
remarkable. Looking back from the 1880s, Arnold Toynbee called it a
bitter argument between economists and human beings (Winch 1996,
6). The depth and breadth of the controversy underlines just how much
ideas matter. What it does not do is explain why all ideas are not created
equal; only some have the capacity to drive ideational regime change.
Fundamental ideational regime changes are rare. To convert one
ideational regime to another, the challenger must meet three difficult
requirements. The new theory must, by means of its own logic, be able
to demonstrate why the currently dominant ideas cannot possibly solve
societys problems. It must be able to explain how intelligent people
could have been so misled. And it must be able to provide an alternative
view of social reality by means of a more compelling public narrative.
Understanding how Malthuss perversity thesis made it possible for market fundamentalism to meet these criteria requires turning to the three
components of its epistemological infrastructuresocial naturalism,
theoretical realism, and the conversion narrative.
Social Naturalism
In using biology to explain society, Malthus was engaged in the project of social naturalism. Social naturalism is the claim that the laws of
nature govern human society. As we stressed in Chapter 1, it is not just
an epistemological stance. It is also an ontologya theory of beingin
which the characteristics of the natural order are mapped onto those of
the social order (Somers 1999, 2008). It is an ontology that should not
be confused with the more familiar methodology of naturalism. Common to Marx and modern positivism, naturalism is the methodological postulate that because nature and society exhibit the same kinds
of regularities, there should be a unied method applicable to both.
Social naturalism, by contrast, conates nature and society. Society is
not like, but is a biological entity, and it is thus subject to biological
laws of nature rather than to institutional rules and social rationality.
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it was restored by the pangs of hunger on the one hand, the scarcity of
food on the other (GT, 119, italics in original).
Townsends social naturalism divides the world by a binary logic
between the naturalwhich was morally and epistemologically privilegedand the much demeaned unnatural. It then maps this hierarchical
divide onto the Lockean dichotomy between state and (market) society
to create a new social and political ontology, one with a parallel dichotomy of epistemological privilege and moral judgment. On the one side,
civil society and the private sphere of market exchange are natural phenomena subject to the certainty, immutability, uncoerced, spontaneous,
and scientically predictable laws of nature. On the other, societys
political institutions and rule-driven state policies are perverse: Based on
unnatural powers, they are arbitrary, coercive, hierarchical, and a continuing threat to the system of natural liberty (Smith 1976 [1776]). By
this logic, state intervention into civil society poses a clear and unending
danger. It was this Lockean-inspired political gloss on social naturalism
that Malthus most appreciated in Townsend and that today still distinguishes Anglo-American political culture from Continental versions of
political theory (Somers 1999, 2008).
Malthuss perversity thesis also had to explain the failures of the old
regime using his own social naturalist principles. By pointing to the
counterintuitive paradox that the greater the poor relief, the greater the
poverty, Malthus undermined institutionalisms foundational precept
that reason and political judgment were solutions to poverty. Appealing to the laws of nature, Malthus invoked the prestige of the scientic
revolution to support his claim that poverty was caused by the conict
between the natural laws of scarcity and the immutable drive for sex and
food. He also gained great leverage by attributing much of his scientic
learning to the esteemed Wealth of Nations (1976 [1776]). It was there
that Malthus rst read that society was a natural system and absorbed
Smiths self-proclaimed very violent attack upon the entire mercantile
system of political and economic regulations (Winch 1996:3).13
But it was Newton who was the real power behind Malthuss skillful
use of social naturalism (Redman 1997). Just as the abstract laws of
physics allowed Newton to explain the harmonious motion of the planets, so did Malthus explain the follies of institutionalism using the same
natural laws of society (see especially Malthus 1992 [1803], 51). The
Essay is full of mathematical allusions allegedly provided by Newtons
scientic discoveries, and it abounds with images of ballistics, weight
Theoretical Realism
It has been observed by Hume that, of all sciences, there is none where
rst appearances are more deceitful than in politics. The remark is
undoubtedly very just, and is most peculiarly applicable to that
department of the science which relates to the modes of improvingtheconditions of the lower classes of society.
Malthus 1992 [1803], 312, (italics added)
With this observation, Malthus makes clear his intention to uncover the
real truth of the politics of poverty and to explain how intelligent and
well-meaning people could have been so deceived by pragmatic institutionalism. For these tasks he turned to the Enlightenment project of
piercing the deceit of rst appearances and using the light of reason
to nd the truth of an underlying rational order. This is theoretical
realism (also called Cartesian rationalism)a militantly anti-positivist theory of causality for which unobservable or theoretical entities,
such as laws of human nature and the regulative principles governing the
relationship between population and food supply are the real (hidden)
causal forces behind the appearances of experience. It is termed theoretical realism because even though the underlying causal mechanisms
cannot be observed, they are more causally real than the misleading
illusions of empirical observations (Somers 1998). Theoretical realism
shares some elements of the epistemic privilege of religious belief. While
it does not depend literally on revelation, like religion, it posits the divide
between appearance and reality.
The broken clock is the classic metaphor of this Enlightenment project. If we have a clock that does not run, it is futile to try to x it by
ddling with the face of the clock. Shattering the illusion that the clocks
causal mechanisms are empirically observable is a precondition for making the clocks inner workings accessible to science. Malthus knew that
the secrets of the social world are not as easily accessible as the gears
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imputed causes, Malthuss list of natural horrors were really just effects,
or demonstrative illustrations, designed to prove the cause that he by
necessity used logic to identify. By reasoning from (observable) effects
to causal (imputed) theoretical entities, theoretical realism gives the misleading impression that his causal claims were based on massive empirical substantiation, rather than what they wereentirely theory-driven.
Lest we appear to be over-interpreting Malthuss method, in the rst
edition of the Essay Malthus makes explicit his low regard for facts
in favor of self-evident visionary plain statement. The Essay might,
undoubtedly, have been rendered much more complete by a collection
of a greater number of facts in elucidation of the general argument. The
Author presumes, however, that the facts which he has adduced will be
found to form no inconsiderable evidence for the truth of his opinion
respecting the future improvement of mankind. As the Author contemplates this opinion at present, little more appears to him to be necessary
than a plain statement, in addition to the most cursory view of society,
to establish it (Malthus 1985 [1798], 61, italics added).
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Ideational Re-Embedding
Malthus understood well the power of narrative to convert elite opinion
to the truth of the perversity thesis, and in his invention of the poverty
to perversity conversion narrative he displayed real genius. With a parsimonious elegance and logic, he uses both theoretical realism and social
naturalism to move us from an initial focus on the illusory causes of
poverty to an endpoint that reveals the real causes to be reckless and
perverse violations of the laws of nature and population. Point by point,
Malthus refutes the entire canon of institutional pragmatism. He fells
the alleged benets of a large and healthy population of working people. He demolishes the institutionalist belief in the social and political
causes of unemployment. He ridicules the capacity of reason to alleviate suffering and improve humanity. And thanks to his adept use of
theoretical realism, he has provided an explanation for how intelligent
and well-meaning people could have been so misled by pragmatic institutionalism. The blame is placed squarely on the mystifying powers of
wrongheaded ideas, not on those whom they deceived. It follows then
that institutional pragmatism is an illegitimate regime whose policies are
not solutions; they are actually themselves the problems.17
Inventing the Undeserving Poor
Of all Malthuss accomplishments, however, none was more portentous
than his radically converting poverty from a structural status in society
to a behavioral choice. Recall that the poor did not originally refer
to a condition of want, indigence, or dependence on poor relief. Rather,
the poor were a class of people whose lack of property compelled them
to labor to survivehence they were also called the labouring or the
working poor. Extreme labor market volatility put them continually
at risk of losing their livelihoods and being forced to seek temporary
poor relief. But falling in and out of poverty was not due to changes
in behavior; rather, it was the precariousness of the poors propertyless
status in the class structure.
Breaking centuries of tradition, Malthus tears apart this structural
denition and transforms the poor from a class location to a moral condition based on personal behavior and lack of biological restraint. This
allows him to bifurcate a once unied status into what later became
codied as the deserving and the undeserving poor. The state of
ones livelihood now became a matter of moral character, with independence and employment privileged as the highest moral achievements.
Only those destitute through no fault of their ownthe old, the crippled, the sick, the disabledwere deserving of charity, and even then
not in the form of parish relief but of private (discretionary) alms. But
able-bodied workers without work and in need exhibited failures of
moral characterthey were the undeserving poor. In this newly moralized taxonomy, the amalgam of being able-bodied, penniless, and seeking assistance (however temporary) made one a moral outlaw, newly
condemned as a pauper. And if beseeched for aid by these morally undeserving, Malthus enjoined the authorities not to eliminate their poverty
and provide relief, but to coerce them into suffering the consequences of
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public opinion. Business Week claimed that Losing Ground lays out
a stark truth that must be faced, while the Wall Street Journal wrote
that Murrays tone is steadfastly non-partisan; he marshals an immense
amount of data in support of his views ... and never ventures a conclusion for which he has not laid the most elaborate and convincing
groundwork (cited in Harpham and Scotch 1988, 199)a stunningly
Malthusian demonstration of how to use theoretical realism to convince
readers that what are only voluminous illustrations are in fact genuine
causal arguments.
It is hardly surprising that by 1994, 71% of respondents in a public opinion survey agreed with the following statement: The welfare
system does more harm than good, because it encourages the breakup
of the family and discourages the work ethic (Weaver, Shapiro, and
Jacobs 1995, 611). Surveys in earlier years did not ask this same question, but respondents had been signicantly less inclined to blame government programs for increasing poverty. Between 1978 and 1986, the
number of respondents who said that government programs generally
made things worse for the poor uctuated between 14% and 20% (Shapiro, Patterson, Russell, and Young 1987).
By 1994, it was clear that ideational regime change had all but triumphed. The poverty to perversity conversion narrative had succeeded
in delegitimating AFDC; both elites and the public were persuaded that
it was doing more harm than good. The path was open to radical policy
transformation.
Still, two additional developments were critical before the ideational
change was converted into a new policy regime. The rst derived from
Murrays (1984) proposal that welfare benets should be limited and
recipients explicitly told that at a denite future time, all government
assistance would end. This idea of an across-the-board time limit transformed into the idea of tailored time limits that would limit the assistance
that any particular recipient could receive. David Ellwood, a Kennedy
School analyst, was one of the rst prominent liberals to embrace this
type of time limit, but only as part of a broader program to raise both
the Earned Income Tax Credit and the minimum wage while guaranteeing a minimum wage job (Ellwood 1988). As routinely happens, when
Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992 in support of a two-year time limit, the
time limit idea was quickly severed from this broader program. Offering
no promise of guaranteed employment, Clinton never explained how
a young mother with few skills could quickly become self-sufficient in
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increase in the use of sanctions to punish recipients for lack of compliance with the new and complex structure of rules (Hays 2003; Handler
2004; Pavetti and Bloom 2001; Shipler 2004). The new policies pushed
millions of single mothers off the welfare rolls, further expanding the
number for whatever low-wage work employers are willing to provide and exacerbating the trend toward growing wage inequality in the
United States (Kuttner 2007).
Conclusion
Every nation has a storya public narrative it tells to explain its place
in the ow of history, to justify its normative principles, to delineate
the boundaries of rational political decision-making, and to give legitimacy to its economic policies and practices. Under normal conditions,
narratives that compete with the mainstream are marginalized beyond
those boundaries; in crisis conditions, however, a contest over ideational
hegemony is likely to erupt. Much is at stake in these battles of ideas, as
the victor will dramatically transform how markets and society interact.
Debates over market policies are thus fought out as battles of contending narratives. History, rival ideas, even crises may conspire to destabilize the ruling ideational regime, but as long as there is no more powerful
alternative story, it will be unthreatened. Ideational regime change in a
societys reigning narrative is a rare event.
Our goal is to understand and bring theoretical clarity to one such
rare eventmarket fundamentalisms rise to hegemony in the late twentieth century. Its very uncommonness signals its importance, but it also
poses a methodological challenge for theorizing beyond a case study.
To gain leverage, we have focused our detailed analysis on its greatest successes in two very different historical eras. The 1996 PRWORA
and the 1834 NPL were divided by enormous contextual differences of
time and place. Yet the centuries between them only deepen the mystery of how such dissimilar environments could produce such similar
outcomes. In both cases, long-prevailing policy regimes of institutional
pragmatism were felled and replaced by market fundamentalism in
just a few short decades. Market fundamentalist views once seen as
extremist rapidly achieved mainstream status and moved the spectrum
of political discourse to the right. In both cases, a public discourse
that reassigned blame for the poors condition from poverty to perversity played the key role. Ideational change was the engine of new
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has over theories that lack their own epistemological bootstraps: its
ideas do not have to be rooted in specic historical circumstances to
exert powerful inuence. This poses a challenge for a sociology of
knowledge that assumes winning ideas are those that t local circumstances. In fact, the very strength of the perversity thesis is that it is not
so rooted, but relies on abstract thought experiments and naturalistic
models that have no empirical referents. Given the common assumption that, in the marketplace of ideas, successful theories are those
that best conrm empirical data, these ndings may be puzzling. But it
seems inescapable that Malthus and Murray triumphed not despite but
because they relied on arguments driven by the seemingly inevitable and
timeless laws of nature and biology, rather than by empirical contextual
referents.
This makes social naturalism perhaps the most potent weapon of
market fundamentalism. Those who believe, even a little, in the sovereignty of nature cannot simultaneously accept the causal powers of
human artice, reason, and political institutions. If the laws of nature
rule, then social and political laws cannot; there can only be one sovereign per ideational regime. Market fundamentalism achieves that status by taking control over what counts as reality. By dening the crises
of the old regime as inevitable results of the failure to obey natures
laws, market fundamentalism establishes itself as the new gatekeeper
of rational discourse and policy debate. While it is shocking, therefore,
it is not surprising that when the House of Representatives was debating the PRWORA, a U.S. Congressperson biologized the poor as beasts
who have been cheated of the natural order. The unconscious allusion to
Townsends island of the goats and the dogs that so inuenced Malthuss
vision of human nature is striking: Mr. Chairman, I represent Florida
where we have many lakes and natural reserves. If you visit these areas,
you may see a sign that reads, do not feed the alligators. We post these
for several reasons. First, because if left in a natural state, alligators can
fend for themselves. They work, gather food and care for their young.
Second, we post these warnings because unnatural feeding and articial care creates dependency. When dependency sets in, these otherwise
able-bodied alligators can no longer survive on their own. Now, I know
people are not alligators, but I submit to you that with our current handout, nonwork welfare system, we have upset the natural order. We have
failed to understand the simple warning signs. We have created a system
of dependency (Mica 1995, emphasis added).
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Still, as impressive and necessary as they are, market fundamentalisms internal causal powers are not sufficient to explain its triumph.21
Outside opportunities were also necessary. One of these was the common cultural heritage of Lockean liberalism. In most non-Anglo-American developed societies, similar efforts to delegitimate welfare programs
have been less successful, achieving only minor retrenchments without
visible impact on rates of poverty and inequality. The United States,
England, and perhaps Australia and New Zealand are the only exceptions (Handler 2004; Hicks 1999; Huber and Stephens 2001; Korpi and
Palme 2003; Smeeding, Rainwater, and Burtless 2001; Solow 2000).
These are all societies with a common Lockean ideational history in
which social naturalism has deep roots. (That the Canadian welfare
state has been growing suggests that the Lockean legacy is necessary but
not sufficient for a society to be at risk for welfare retrenchment). Social
naturalism allowed Locke to make civil society and markets natural and
self-regulating entities free from coercive governmental authority. Distrust of the state, high condence in the freedom of the markets natural
laws, and the essential biologization of human nature are all part of this
mix of social naturalism and the Lockean legacy.
Sequential patterns of external events also created openings and
opportunities for market fundamentalism. In both cases, a cascade of
problems became full-blown national political crises only when the old
regimes could no longer absorb and neutralize them, making the government look unstable, weak, and oundering. The resulting policy vacuum
created an opening for once-marginalized competing ideas to enter into
public debates over what should be done, and in the ensuing battles of
clashing ideational systems the persuasiveness of the perversity thesis
accorded a new mainstream legitimacy to the once extreme challengers.
These patterns also reveal the vulnerability of institutional pragmatism. Its pragmatism pushes it toward technocratic xes of immediate
and urgent problems, rather than toward comprehensive moral visions.
Mercantilism and the New Deal/Great Society were in many ways bricolages of problem-driven solutions that accumulated over time. When
challenged by progressive social movements, pragmatic institutionalists often respond with reforms that morally strengthen the regime. But
when challenged by market fundamentalism, the impulse to make concessions only serves to make these regimes appear incoherent relative to
the moral purity of their opponents proposals. Pragmatic policy-making produces regime frailty. When faced with problem overload, its very
Afterword
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act
of 1996 represented a signicant turning point in U.S. politics. When Bill
Clinton signed the bill, the Democratic Party had won only two out of
the last six presidential elections. After he signed, the Democrats proceeded to win four out of the next ve presidential elections, although
George W. Bush was awarded the White House in 2000 by the Supreme
Court without a recount of ballots in Florida. Victorious Republicans in
the rst period invariably tied their Democratic opponent to an unpopular program that much of the public perceived as providing benets to
an overwhelmingly minority population. From 1996 onward, Democrats could claim that their party had ended welfare as we knew it and
thus render such Republican attacks impotent.22
To be sure, Republicans have gone on to deploy the rhetoric of perversity against virtually all remaining government benet program, including food stamps, unemployment insurance, the earned income tax credit,
social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But these rhetorical attacks
have, thus far, failed to discredit programs that are perceived by much
of the public as providing necessary support to deserving people. In fact,
Republican proposals to privatize or voucherize Social Security and
Medicare have proven politically unpopular and have contributed to
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The irony was that Romney ended up the election with just a little more
than 47% of the vote, suggesting that he was unable to hold the votes
of a signicant number of those who he dened as productive and independent citizens.
While it is hard to dispute that the 1996 welfare legislation had a
major impact on electoral politics, this success has effectively frozen
the new policies in place and has largely immunized them from criticism.
The Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) program was reauthorized in 2005, and another reauthorization has been pending since 2010.
However, the delays in reauthorization have little to do with progressive
criticisms of TANF; they come almost entirely from continuing Republican efforts to reduce spending to the poor even further. In fact, no major
voices have been raised in the Democratic Party for expanding benets
or for reconsidering the logic of the program.
Bill and Hillary Clinton have very visibly reconsidered certain policies enacted during the Clinton presidency; they have both rejected the
dont ask, dont tell policy on gays in the military and they have repudiated the Defense of Marriage Act that had been signed just a month
after the PRWORA. But they continue to defend welfare reform as a
great success despite considerable evidence to the contrary. Moreover,
because of its electoral potency, the establishment of the Democratic
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help when jobs disappeared. Despite the worst economy in decades, the
cash welfare rolls have barely budged. Faced with at federal nancing
and rising need, Arizona is one of 16 states that have cut their welfare
caseloads further since the start of the recessionin its case, by half.
Even as it turned away the needy, Arizona spent most of its federal welfare dollars on other programs, using permissive rules to plug state budget gaps (DeParle 2012).
In short, in many states of the union, when children faced hunger
and homelessness because their parents had lost employment in a global
economic downturn, the TANF program refused to provide assistance.
It is difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of this as a policy failure.
Moreover, it is a policy failure that could only be justied by the most
extreme version of the perversity thesis; one which insists that individuals, including children, are personally responsible for meeting their own
needs even when unemployment had reached catastrophic levels. And
yet, there has been virtually no debate about this policy failure.
TANFs massive inadequacies should not surprise, however; after
all, they had already been revealed in an earlier disasterHurricane
Katrinas catastrophic impact on New Orleans in 2005. Here again,
the storm and its aftermath received enormous media coverage, but
almost no one connected the dots and showed that the scale of the
disaster was also linked to the 1996 PRWORA. It is thus worthwhile
to revisit Somers (2008) argument, which elaborates the Polanyian
argument about the destructive consequences of market fundamentalist ideas.
Polanyi emphasizes that while the free-market utopia cannot be
achieved, the ideologically driven effort to impose it on society will nevertheless have disastrous consequences for vulnerable sectors of society.
In his view, the whole idea of protective measures such as the Old Poor
Laws is that they buffer people from rapid shifts in the market. In rural
counties of England, for example, in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, there was a sudden collapse of long-established rural crafts
that had provided a signicant amount of employment. But Poor Law
assistance gave families time to adjust and nd replacement sources of
income. Without such buffering mechanisms, he stresses that the very
survival of entire communities is put at risk (Somers 1993, 1995).
But market fundamentalists have argued that citizenship should be
treated as a contractual quid pro quo market relationship in which
once-basic rights and government assistance should be provided only
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followed. While not as extreme, the fate of the poor of New Orleans can
be analyzed in similar terms; even within their own nation, they had lost
the right to have the rights of social inclusion and citizenship.
Two separate disastersHurricane Katrina and the global nancial
crisishave revealed the failure of the welfare legislation passed in
1996. And yet, there is still no hint that the political system is willing to
revisit that legislation and devise a more humane and just response to
millions of people living in poverty. By every indicator, the United States
has the highest percentage of religiously observant Christians of any of
the worlds developed societies. And in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus
told his followers with great clarity: Truly I tell you, whatever you did
for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for
me (Matthew 25:40). At some level, the gap between this New Testament injunction and the cruelty of poverty policies in the United States is
impossible to fathom. But we have tried to show that the rhetoric of perversity is an important element in making sense of this abiding paradox.
7
THE ENDURING STRENGTH OF
F R E E M A R K E T C O N S E R VA T I S M
I N T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S
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and when it is fully implemented. But the price paid for this long awaited
measure has been heightened and continuous resistance to what conservatives label Big Government. In its ght against health care reform
in 2009 and 2010, the right successfully mobilized both grassroots and
top-down (astro-turf) protest against what they called an unprecedented expansion in federal powers, and this widely publicized Tea
Party activism contributed to major gains by the Republicans in the
2010 midterm elections.
The irony is that what many citizens have been convinced is huge
government overreach is, in fact, small in comparison to most other
developed market societies. U.S. taxes as a percent of GDP are dramatically lower than the average among European nations, even though
the outlays for military and security purposes are many times greater
than those in other developed nations.2 The combination of lower taxes
and much higher military and national security spending means that
the United States allocates a far smaller share of GDP for domestic programs than most other developed nations, which are far more generous
in assisting the elderly, the unemployed, and especially the poor (Huber
and Stephens 2001; Pontusson 2005). In comparison, market inequalities in the United States have accelerated virtually unimpeded. More
than 20% of children are living at any time in households below the
poverty line; the comparable gures in most European nations are below
5%. In this respect, there is a marked continuity: despite brief periods
of market regulations in the New Deal and the Great Society, the United
States has been a laggard in public social provision since the last decades
of the nineteenth century (Skocpol 1992), and the pattern persists today.
Even so, extreme hostility to government continues to be a far more
potent political force in the United States than elsewhere.3 The relatively
modest Obama health care legislation produced an intense anti-government backlash virtually absent in other developed nations where universal health coverage has been routine for generations.
There is a puzzle here, since it seemed in the 1960s that the United
States was converging with Western Europe (Shoneld 1969). That was
a decade of major welfare state expansion in most developed countries,
perhaps most dramatized by the Johnson Administrations Medicare
and Medicaid Acts in 1965 that passed with bipartisan Congressional
support. Even when the Republicans gained the presidency in 1968, the
Nixon Administration proposed an ambitious welfare reform agenda
that would have provided a oor under every citizens income (see
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(1990) documented the huge gaps between the three different worlds of
welfare capitalism. He contrasted liberal welfare states like the United
States and the U.K. with the more generous provision found in Continental and social democratic welfare states. More recently, Huber and
Stephens (2001) showed that those gaps persisted through the 1990s.
Data from the Luxemburg Income Survey show that the likelihood that
a child will live in poverty is almost three times greater in the United
States than in France or Germany (Block, Korteweg, and Woodward
2006). Moreover, government data show that rates of both poverty and
extreme poverty have been rising in the United States since 2000 (U.S.
Census Bureau 2012, table 22). European polities have been engaged in
some welfare state retrenchment, but the European Communities commitment to reducing social exclusion has meant that programs targeted to protect children have generally been insulated from cuts. Even
the U.K. made signicant reductions in child poverty rates between 1998
and 2005 (Smeeding 2005; Brewer et al. 2010).7
As the only developed nation that lacks national health insurance, the
United States has also long been an outlier in comparative health indicators. But the variance has grown even greater more recently as the role
of prescription drugs in health care delivery has increased and the United
States has given drug companies carte blanche to charge whatever the
market will bear for their products (Angell 2004). The consequence is
that, while many in Western Europe have condence that they will be protected from health crises, the great majority of people in the United States
live in fear that they will not be able to afford the health care necessary to
keep a family member alive or healthy (Rifkin 2004; Hacker 2006).
The second area of difference is in measures of inequality of income
and wealth. From the 1970s to the present, the United States has experienced a dramatic increase in the share of income that goes to the top
1% of households. Measures of income show the share of income going
to that top 1% rising from 7.7% in 1973 to 17.4% in 2011 (Saez and
Piketty 2013, with update at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/). While the
pattern in the U.K. has been similar to that of the United States, albeit
less extreme, both France and Germany have experienced declines in the
share of income held by the top 1% in this same time period (Piketty
and Saez 2012). These trends in income have produced a distribution of
wealth that can only be described as oligarchic (Winters 2011). What
follows from this oligarchic trend in the United States is that households in the bottom half of the income distribution have experienced
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United States were to take a left turn in its social policies and Europe
were to move sharply to curtail welfare state spending, it would most
certainly take decades before these patterns were likely to converge. It is
important to bear these differences in mind as we look at the factors that
have pushed the United States along its peculiar trajectorythe strength
of its right-wing movement and the decision of its business community
to build a political alliance with a grassroots conservative movement.
lasted from 19791989, the Christian Coalition played a key role nationally from 1989 to the early 2000s, and Tea Party organizations of varying durations sprang to life suddenly in 2009. But while the specic
organizations come and go, four durable features make it reasonable to
categorize it as a relatively unied phenomenon.
1. Organizational autonomy. Since its inception, grassroots and populist conservatism has been a reliable element in the Republican Partys
political coalition. But, for strategic reasons, the movement has been
careful to maintain a signicant degree of autonomy from the Partys
organizational apparatus. So, for example, activists in the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition routinely distributed campaign materials in support of Republican candidates, but they retained the ability
to withhold support from candidates who they considered to be insufciently conservative.9 This allowed the movement to exert continual
pressure on Republican politicians to avoid moving to the center or compromising with Democrats on those issues most important to the movement. The contrast to how the labor movement relates to the Democratic
Party could not be greater. In the 1930s and 1940s, labor was strong
enough to obtain concessions from the Democrats in exchange for their
electoral support. By the 1950s and 1960s, however, labor had lost so
much autonomy that it had little leverage in party debates (Plotke 1996).
2. Ongoing funding support. In August of 1971, Lewis Powell, at the
time a corporate lawyer but soon to a Nixon appointee to the Supreme
Court, wrote a manifesto in the form of a memo to a colleague at the
Chamber of Commerce in which he outlined clear and present threats
to the free enterprise system and the need for a concerted response by
the business community (http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_
lewis/). In it he admonished the business community to take the offensive against their anti-capitalist critics or risk losing the battle of
ideas. His argument is encapsulated in these two paragraphs: While
neither responsible business interests, nor the United States Chamber of
Commerce, would engage in the irresponsible tactics of some pressure
groups, it is essential that spokesmen for the enterprise systemat all
levels and at every opportunitybe far more aggressive than in the past.
There should be no hesitation to attack the [Ralph] Naders, the [Herbert] Marcuses and others who openly seek destruction of the system.
There should not be the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all
political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there
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be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it. The Powell memorandum catalyzed a new phase of institution building on the
right that included the creation of new think tanks such as the Heritage
Foundation and the Cato Institute, as well as a groundswell of nancial
giving on the part of business in the effort to construct a new network
of organizations that proposed and lobbied for policies consistent with
the free enterprise agenda (Medvetz 2012). And notwithstanding the
elite sponsorship of this extensive organizational complex, the grassroots part of the movement beneted enough to continually enhance
its mobilizing capacity. That in turn bolstered the movements leverage
over and autonomy from the Republican Party apparatus (Hacker and
Pierson 2010; Phillips-Fein 2009).
3. Ideological fusion. While tactics and emphases have shifted over
time, conservative organizations have sustained a core ideology that
combines a defense of traditional values with market fundamentalisma quasi-religious belief in the absence of any and all market regulations as the source of personal liberty. As we argue in Chapter 6, much
of this ideology has been recycled from early nineteenth-century Christian political economy, especially that which blamed poverty on a perverse lack of personal responsibility and moral degradation, all caused
by the very governmental institutions designed to prevent these very
afflictions. Just as Malthus decried in the nineteenth century that governmental assistance threatens the individuals capacity to be self-sufficient
and personally responsible, so too does todays conservative ideology
relentlessly attack the perversity of government compassion (Frank
2004; Goldberg 2006; Hirschman 1991).
Decades ago, the political theorist Sheldon Wolin highlighted the contradictions in this ideological fusion between traditional moral dogma
and laissez-faire political economy: The destruction of traditional values is also the condition for the innovating economy to operate freely.
The modernizing economy is voracious, not only of natural resources,
but of the traditional human resources summed in traditions: resources
of skill, craftsmanship, domesticity, personal ties, and common morality (Wolin 1980, 10). The operation of the free market inevitably tends
to subvert both traditional values and the communities that have sustained them. The big box retail stores such as WalMart force thousands
of locally owned small businesses into bankruptcy. Nevertheless, these
contradictions do not appear to have lessened the mobilizing power of
A Polanyian Countermovement
It may seem ironic to use Polanyis conceptual repertoire to understand
a social movement that has been fervently committed to the very free
market conservatism he so passionately criticized as a utopian impossibility. But it is precisely Polanyis understanding of the effects of unfettered markets on both left and right that makes his ideas so pertinent for
our analysis. Polanyi understood the power of nationalism to deect the
dislocations inicted by the market. And indeed, populist conservatism
has consistently deployed a strongly nationalist rhetoric and exhibited
a deep distrust of other nations, international institutions, and foreign
commitments as threats to the sovereignty of the United States. Thus the
George W. Bush administration solidied its right-wing base with a militaristic and unilateralist response to the terrorist attacks of September
2001 (Block 2003).
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More recently, Tea Party activists have agitated against uncontrolled immigrationboth legal and illegalfrom Latin America, the
Middle East, and Asia (Skocpol and Williamson 2012). These hardened expressions of nationalism echo Polanyis discussion in The Great
Transformation of how the nineteenth-century gold standard engendered a nationalist response that was everywhere producing the hard
shell of the emerging unit of social life (GT, 211). And it is therefore
not surprising that the rise of extreme movement conservatism coincides with the same four-decade period over which globalization has so
relentlessly undermined the socioeconomic lives of working and middle
classes. The indicators are familiargiant stores that are stocked almost
entirely with imports from abroad, factories and other workplaces that
have closed down or moved offshore, and a rising percentage of foreign
born in the population.
These processes of economic globalization, it is true, have not only been
disruptive; they have simultaneously generated new economic opportunities. Parts of the South, for example, have been particularly successful
in attracting new manufacturing jobs provided by foreign-based multinationals. But even when its economic impact has been relatively benign,
globalization is still perceived as deeply disruptive of established ways
of living, and conservatism has been highly successful in channeling the
anxieties it creates into greater loyalty to the movement (Wald, Owen,
and Hill 1989; Hardisty 2004; Somers 2008, ch.3).
Evidence for the centrality of this anti-globalization current can be
gleaned from Texas, where conservatism has had the greatest organizational strength. The movement has elected majorities to the State Board
of Education and has successfully pushed the states Republican Party
far to the right. The Partys 2012 platform calls for the withdrawal of
the United States from the United Nations, the International Monetary
Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank, and it proposes an end to all foreign aid except in emergency circumstances (http://
convention.texasgop.org/). Despite the fact that the state is deeply integrated into the global economy, the rejection of international organizations is indicative of a powerful xenophobia.
Furthermore, as we elaborate in Chapters 5 and 6, the peculiar blending
of Christianity and free-market ideology at the core of the conservative
belief system reincarnates the ideas of T. R. Malthus and the Christian political economy that ourished in the early decades of English
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of ideology the movement insists that individuals are on their own, conservative organizations its actual practices provide forms of protection
from disruptions caused by market processes.
The anti-abortion movement has from the start exhibited a similar
kind of displacement. As the social movement at the very epicenter of
movement conservativism, it has explicitly adopted the language of
protection, declaring its mission is to protect and save the unborn
child from murder. Perhaps inadevertently, these movement activists
are displacing onto the fetus their own feelings of vulnerability in the
face of powerful market forces they cannot control. Indeed, their rhetoric resembles the language of progressives who advocate government
policies to protect children born in extreme poverty from a life with
no prospects. The difference between conservatism and progressivism is
that the right to life interventions called for by the anti-abortion movement are designed to protect only a fetus. When progressives and liberals
claim similar protections for actual living human beings, the right rejects
them as dangerous gateway drugs to government dependency.
Over the decades, populist grassroots conservatism has stumbled onto
a remarkably durable organizing model. By championing the free market and opposing welfare-oriented policies aimed to assist the poor and
the vulnerable among us, it assures that millions of people remain vulnerable to the economic and psychological pressures generated by globalization and heightened economic interdependence. At the same time,
it reaches out to these same vulnerable individuals and organizes them
into quixotic campaigns designed to restore traditional social values and
uphold a hyper-individualist ideology in which we are each responsible
for our own fate (Hacker 2006; Somers 2008).
with the conservative righta decision that has driven American politics
ever since (Himmelstein 1990; Micklethwait and Woolridge 2004; Phillips-Fein 2009; Smith 2012).
There is a long history of Americas exceptionally stingy public sphere.
Before the New Deal, and contributing mightily to the tragic impact of
the Great Depression, the United States had already been a welfare state
laggard (Skocpol 1992). Public old-age pensions that were established
in most European countries after World War I were not instated in the
United States until 1935. Even then, many in the business community
vehemently opposed Roosevelt and many of his reforms (Katznelson
2013). By World War II and through the following decades, however,
American business made its peace with the expanded role of the federal
government (Blyth 2002; Swenson 2002). It accommodated itself to the
New Deal order because it beneted greatly from the governments putting an effective oor under aggregate demand and protecting rms from
various forms of illegitimate competition. Furthermore, the passage of
Taft-Hartley and the McCarthyite purges of left-wing unions weakened
the corporations most threatening opponents. Similarly, the shifts to
business Keynesianism and military Keynesianism were reassuring bulwarks against the inuence of European social democratic ideas,
which had ourished among left Keynesians in the 1930s (Collins 1981).
Another important factor in business cooperation with government
was the United States global role during World War II and continuing
during the Cold War. While the typical American rm was provincial
in its business strategy and had little to gain from the billions spent on
overseas military efforts, these companies were persuaded of the correctness of the governments foreign policy. They were eager participants
in a powerful political coalition favoring the systematic projection of
U.S. power globally that was led by the largest, internationally oriented
corporations. From Pearl Harbor through the 1960s, U.S. foreign policy operated as the necessary lubricant to facilitate business cooperation
with the expansion of the federal governments economic role. The existence of a coherent foreign policy establishmentwith roots in the internationally oriented segment of the business communityoperated as a
bridge between the business community and successive administrations
in Washington.11 This foreign policy elite was particularly important in
cementing relations between Democratic administrations and the business community. Under this elite sector, business abandoned its traditional anti-statist rhetoric, and corporate liberals who believed that
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government had an important role to play in solving social and economic problems assumed positions of great inuence (Domhoff 1990).
But all of this changed in the 1970s. The broad anti-business sentiment fostered by the radical movements of the 1960s and early 1970s
generated a full-scale conservative countermobilization. As outlined in
Lewis Powells 1971 memo, the strategy was to build counterinstitutions such as conservative think tanks and other policy organizations to
challenge what they claimed was the liberal/left bias of the media and
the intelligentsia. Most important, they reasserted traditional free-market economics, demeaned Keynesianism, and began a systematic effort
to reverse the New Deal expansion in the governments economic role
(Phillips-Fein 2009). Almost overnight, corporate liberalism went
into decline and was replaced by the corporate embrace of market
fundamentalism. This political alignment remained largely unchanged
through 2008. Even the brief Clinton interregnum (19932000) had little enduring impact. Despite his administrations centrist policies, Clinton failed to bring any signicant business constituencies back into a
durable alliance with the Democratic Party. Corporate campaign contributions still owed disproportionately to Republicans, who offered tax
cuts, anti-labor policies, and reduced regulation as a quid pro quo (see
Clawson, Neustadtl, and Weller 1998; more recent data are available at
the Center for Responsive Politics, http://www.opensecrets.org).
What accounts for the swiftness of the transformation in the political allegiance of business between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s?
No comparable shift occurred among European business leaders, who
maintained their wary acceptance of the welfare state during this period.
Indeed, as late as 1969, a business-dominated blue ribbon commission
appointed by President Johnson endorsed the idea of a federal guaranteed income as a solution to problems of poverty and racial inequality
(Katz 1989). By 1980, however, the most visible representatives of the
business community were supporting Reagans efforts to dismantle signicant parts of the limited American welfare state. At the time of these
shifts, some analysts offered an explanation of the transformation in
sectoral or regional terms; new business interests rooted in the South
and Southwest had dramatically come into their own and overwhelmed
the traditional liberalism of East Coast business elites (Salt 1989). But
the empirical foundations for this argument were always shaky, as was
the idea that long-dominant business interests would lose power so
suddenly.
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argued earlier, the Reagan Administrations market oriented policies created economic dislocations that fueled the right wing and even created a
new class of Reagan Democrats. Corporate downsizing in the 1980s
and 1990s eliminated millions of factory jobs and middle-management
positions. Entire industries, such as meat packing, that had provided
unionized jobs shifted to the employment of a low-wage labor force,
including many undocumented immigrants. Big-box retailers, led by
Walmart, expanded their domain, closing off many of the traditional
niches for small retail businesses. Millions more people lost their access
to health insurance as medical costs escalated dramatically. And, nally,
continuing scal constraints on spending by state and local governments
meant that there was no place to turn for help with medical emergencies
or nancing higher education for ones children (Harrison 1994; Blau
1999; Applebaum, Bernhardt, and Murmane, eds. 2003).
The modernizing economy that Reagan unleashed also continued
to accelerate the racial and gender transformations of the 1960s that
threatened much of middle America and fueled an explosive culture war. As a consequence, grassroots conservatism transformed itself
in the 1980s and 1990s into a powerful Polanyian countermovement
driven by deep dissatisfaction with economic insecurities and the impact
of continuing cultural modernization. At the same time, it maintained its
organizational independence from the Republican Party and its business
allies. This, combined with its increasing strength of numbers, allowed
movement conservatism to become increasingly powerful relative to its
business partners.
It was business Republicans who originally built the Reagan revolution in the 1970s and early 1980s and who opportunistically incorporated grassroots conservatives as their populist junior partners, but over
the following thirty years power relations shifted and the position of
business within the coalition became progressively weaker. When George
H.W. Bush was defeated in 1992 by Bill Clinton, the result was intensied grassroots mobilization against the Democrats that culminated
in the Republicans winning control of Congress in 1994. These newly
empowered Congressional Republicans, moreover, showed little deference to business preferences for predictability; they forced a shutdown
of the federal government in 1995 and 1996 and pursued impeachment
of President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair.
True, George W. Bush had campaigned as a compassionate conservative in 2000, but his administration pursued a more right-wing agenda
under pressure from the conservative base.14 Indeed, its new political
clout helps to explain why the Bush administration turned away from
multilateralism after 9/11 (Block 2003). A more logical response to the
terrorist attacks would have been a concerted effort to strengthen the
fabric of global cooperation, including a new Marshall Plan to jumpstart economic growth in the developing world, and especially in Islamic
regions. But, while such a policy would have been consistent with the
history of U.S. business internationalism, it would also have strengthened the international institutions that movement conservatives view
with enormous suspicion.
Historically, conservative primary voters had shown considerable deference to the Partys leadership; as late as 2004 and 2006, for example,
moderate Republican Senators Lincoln Chafee and Arlen Specter were
able to defeat right-wing primary challengers. But after the election of
Barack Obama in 2008, resentment towards the failures of the Bush
Administration and intense hostility to the nations rst African American president further expanded the conservative movements inuence
over the Republican electorate. And in 2010 and 2012, Republican primary voters began choosing far right candidates over more establishment gures, even when they were opposing incumbents. These more
conservative candidates in Delaware, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Nevada,
Alaska, Utah, Colorado, Indiana, Missouri, Texas, and Florida were
able to raise considerable funds from right wing PACs and conservative
billionaires.15 While a number of these far right candidates lost seats
that Republicans had been favored to win, the success of the primary
challenges sent a message to Republican incumbents that almost any
cooperation with the Democratic Party could end their political careers.
Not surprisingly, its thirty-year alliance with movement conservatism
has signicantly transformed the business communityboth in its perceptions and in its organizational capacities. The market fundamentalist
doctrine that has served as the glue of this political coalition instructs
business executives not to get tripped up on social responsibility; their
only responsibility is to increase returns to the shareholders (Crouch
2009). Moreover, under the theory of alignment, corporate executives
are most effective if they act as owners of the rms that they are supposed to only be managing (Useem 1993). This, in turn, has encouraged
an explosion in corporate compensation as executives have been showered with stock options, bonuses, and other incentives, all of which serve
to reinforce executive xation on short-term results, as these have an
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the law rms and investment banks also found themselves in a more
competitive environment where even senior rainmakers were required to
attend to their billable hours (Bradlow 1988). And as the norms of elite
business compensation escalated dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s,
fewer and fewer active business people were interested in taking valuable time away from such urgent tasks as managing their already considerable investment portfolios.
In addition to affecting its hierarchy of priorities, the long-term alliance with movement conservatism has also transformed the organizational capacities of the business community. This is the context in which
the huge investment by right-wing foundations in think tanks and policy organizations has proven so important. In place of the earlier strata
of organic intellectuals who had deep roots in actual businesses, these
organizations have promoted and recruited new cohorts of business
intellectuals whose primary ideological commitments are to market
fundamentalism, more a political platform than an economic strategy.
Not surprisingly, then, these hired guns are more loyal to the Republican
coalition than to business itself.17 At the same time, the Republican Party
leadership has worked aggressively since 1994 on the K Street Projecta stratagem designed to ensure that the top positions at big businesss trade associations and lobbying rms are dominated exclusively
by litmus-tested ideological Republicans (Dubose and Reid 2004). The
message is explicit: lobbyists on Capitol Hill will only be rewarded with
access to legislators if they demonstrate themselves to be loyal Republicans who place partisan interests above specic business concerns.
Big business, in short, effectively outsourced its policy development
and lobbying activities to conservative ideologues while focusing on the
immediate bottom line. This locked business into its alliance with movement conservatism and to whatever foreign policy a Republican administration chose to pursue. Conservative think tanks are clearly not funded
to consider or reconsider the successes and failures of market fundamentalism, nor to invent alternative policy paradigms. So even if some sectors of the business community develop serious reservations about their
alliance with the right, their options are limited because the business policy apparatus has been effectively captured. To be sure, there have been
signs of strain between business interests and the extreme right for years
now. Especially on so-called cultural and social issues such as affirmative action, homosexual rights, embryonic stem cell research, immigration reform, and science education, there have recurring conicts where
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Conclusion
This analysis of why the United States has moved along a different path
for the last generation than most of its European allies is Polanyian in
two distinct respects. First, Polanyi emphasizes the ironic and unexpected
consequences of the project of implementing the unachievable utopia
of a self-regulating market. He explains, for example, how the rush to
empire by European powers in the last decades of the nineteenth century
was, in fact, a direct consequence of the strains created by adherence to
the rules of the international gold standard. Measures designed to create
an open world economy had completely opposite effects. In the current
case, the irony is that U.S. government efforts to create and maintain an
open world economy and to impose market-driven domestic policies
have created a powerful protective countermovement that has taken a
distinctly right-wing form.
Second, Polanyi recognizes the disproportionate political inuence
wielded by big business, as well as its affinity for structural hypocrisy
as it mobilizes market fundamentalist arguments to justify using state
power to secure its advantaged position in competitive struggles. We
have emphasized the centrality to U.S. politics of the recent alliance
between big business and movement conservatives despite the considerable strains that should divide these very different constituencies.
Our story centers on how the U.S. business community forged an alliance with a newly insurgent populist conservatism, a social movement
built more from burning resentment towards blacks, the poor, and Democratic welfare policies than any particular allegiance to a business elite.
While big business initially dominated this alliance, its relative power
began to diminish in the 1990s. As extreme right-wing conservatism
gained control of the Republican Party apparatus, it was able to exert
greater inuence not only at the grassroots but also in Washington. By
the time G. W. Bush was awarded a contested presidential victory in
2000, business had lost inuence on both foreign policy and a range of
domestic social policies. In return, business was rewarded with continuing tax cuts, supportive federal spending, and a lax regulatory environment. But the quid pro quo for these favors was a forced acquiescence
to the conservative rights agenda for both foreign and domestic policy.
Much of the divergence between the United States and Europe can
be traced to the 1970s, when these political dynamics began. Europe,
in contrast to the United States, did not develop a comparable grassroots conservative countermovement. Until now, at least, national
health insurance in combination with other forms of public provision
has reduced the uncertainties of everyday life for most Europeans sufficiently to lock in solid electoral support for continuity in public spending. At the same time, Europe has not seen any similar resurgence of
religious belief or affiliation. While right-wing countermovements have
emerged in several European countries, they have been driven primarily
by national chauvinism and focused on an anti-immigration ideology.
With some exceptions, they have not exerted the kind of inuence on
socioeconomic provisioning policies that movement conservatism has
achieved in the United States.
But it also must be emphasized that the future of the European Community remains highly uncertain. The crisis that unfolded in 2012, with
the threat that Greece and possibly other nations might be forced to
leave the Eurozone, exposed deep tensions in the project of European
integration. In response to the European scal crisis, moreover, a broad
retreat from the common currency remains a possibility. If such a retreat
were to occur, it would be a grave threat to the future of European welfare states. Still, this scenario differs from the trajectory in the United
States, where even more limited social insurance programs are under
continuous threat by conservative political opposition. The future of
U.S. politics may well depend on whether the business community is
persuaded to reconsider its alliance with movement conservatism.
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8
THE REALITY OF SOCIETY
It cannot be denied that however great a thinker Karl Polanyi was very
much a failed prophet. In The Great Transformation (hereafter GT),
he predicted that with the turmoil of the 1930s and 1940s, the idea of
the self-regulating market had suffered a nal and catastrophic defeat.
While the early post-World War II decades seemed to conrm his prediction, this volume has told a different story. From the mid-1970s
onward, free-market utopianism has been revived with disastrous consequences, including vastly increased inequality and greater economic
instability.
The very mark of towering intellectuals, however, is that we can learn
from them even when their predictions are proven wrong. For GT,
along with its relatively optimistic anticipations of the post-World War
II world, warns in no less pronounced a manner that without a deeper
change in how we understand the social world, we might slide back into
the views that were discredited by the global economic collapse of the
1930s. This call for a change in understanding Polanyi names a new governance philosophy. Its philosophy is that of the reality of society, which
we explore in some depth in this concluding chapter.
Despite being much less well known than other major economic thinkers, Karl Polanyi provides us with the most incisive intellectual apparatus
available to understand the actual workings and consequences of market
economies (Stiglitz 2001). Chapters 2 through 4 presented this apparatus
and its conceptual vocabulary, Chapter 5 explored in greater detail one of
the historical transformations at the center of Polanyis argument, while
Chapters 6 and 7 employ a Polyani-inspired institutionalist approach to
analyze several of the critical events and processes that have marked the
recent rise of market fundamentalism in the United States.
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This three-dimensional conceptual armature joins together the wideranging subjects we have covered in the preceding chapters. But it can
also be seen as the foundation that underlies Polanyis central metaphor
of a long-term contestation between the two sides of his double movement. On the one side, the forces of laissez-faire justify an ever-expanding process of commodication by invoking the utopian promise of a
fully self-regulating market society free of politics. On the other, multiple
social movements mobilize in opposition to defend society against market domination by establishing institutional protections. While Polanyi
demonstrates that protective countermovements can be reactionary and
regressive as well as progressive, he leaves no doubt that he is above all
committed to democratically-motivated procedures to manage markets.
It is a great theory that provides the conceptual tools to illuminate and
understand its own aws. Thus our three-pronged framework also helps
explain Polanyis overly optimistic prediction that the back and forth of
the double movement would come to an end with the effective defeat of
both free-market fundamentalism and fascism in the 1940s. While in GT
Polanyi expresses condence that, after World War II, the market would
be subordinated to democratic politics, he appears substantially less sure
about the paradigmatic shift towards a new understanding of freedom.
The great passion and intensity that is evident in the nal pages of the
book betray his sense that his was still a voice in the wilderness, and that
market liberalisms misleading concept of freedom remained hegemonic.
Moreover, in an important article written just a few years after GT, he
is more explicitly pessimistic that without a deeper paradigm shift away
from our obsolete market mentality, society would be on the precipice
of disaster (Polanyi 1947).
In the short run, at least, his optimism was justied, as social democracy, greater equality, and expanding inclusiveness ourished over the
course of the next three decades. But the paradigm shift towards a
new governance philosophy never occurred, and social democracy was
unable to draw sufficient support to sustain and renew itself when it ran
into problems in the 1960s and 1970s. At that moment, free-market
utopianism reasserted itself with undiminished force.
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the fteen most competitive nations on the planet. This is a surprising result, since measures of competitiveness are business oriented and
tend to mark countries down for having high tax rates. Nevertheless,
the Nordic Social Democracies ranked very high because of the superior
skill levels of their labor forces, the support for innovation as a result
of large investments in science and technology, and the high degree of
effectiveness of public programs.
Yet despite all of this, social democrats are in retreat. As Judt (2010,
6) noted: Many European countries have long practiced something
resembling social democracy: but they have forgotten how to preach it.
Social democrats today are defensive and apologetic. Critics who claim
that the European model is too expensive or economically inefficient
have been allowed to pass unchallenged. And yet, the welfare state is
as popular as ever with its beneciaries: nowhere in Europe is there a
constituency for abolishing public health services, ending free or subsidized education or reducing public provision of transport and other
essential services.
Social democrats, in short, appear to have lost their social democratic
convictions; they have not been able to reinvent their tradition to face
the new circumstances of the twenty-rst century and they have not
been able to take the offensive against the resurgence of free-market
doctrine. Instead, too often they have sought to emulate the market
model, usually with only minimalist modications (Crouch 2011). As
we argued in Chapter 1 in pointing out the differences between Polanyi
and Keynes, twentieth-century social democrats abandoned the moral
critique of the inequalities and injustices of market society; for several
generations, they instead made their political appeals solely on the pragmatic grounds that they would be better able than politicians in other
parties to deliver the goods.
But this is simply the surface level of the deeper problem that Polanyi
identied in the nal pages of GT. While social democrats were successful in demonstrating that a more just economy that was subjected to
democratic political constraints could be highly productive, they failed
to advance the philosophic transformation that Polanyi called for. They
did not articulate a new governance philosophy and a new conception of
human freedom. And without that deeper transformation, they have had
no compelling vision to counter free-market advocates who insist that
a meddlesome government will inevitably destroy individual autonomy
and freedom.
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for economic motivations and activities. He argues, moreover, that reinventing the social world as a system that works according to the laws of
the jungle was among the most signicantand egregiousof classical
political economys dictates, as it transformed our social world from a
system of socially-constructed arrangements into one that achieved its
own equilibrium by being left alone to self-regulate no differently from
dogs and goats alone on an island. By dening human agency and the
social world as as subject to the same laws as the natural world, Polanyi
argues that classical political economy achieved three of its greatest
accomplishments1) to rule the economy as out of bounds for political
intervention; 2) to make the sole criteria for public policies only those
practices that played upon peoples biological instincts for survival; and
3) to make the study of human livelihood an axiomatic science based on
highly problematic assumptions.
The rst accomplishment was deeply political, and the aim was to
block any government efforts to regulate labor conditions or to bring
relief to the poor. Polanyi identies the target as Thomas Hobbess celebration of the state (2008 [1651]). According to Townsend and the
political economists, Hobbes was mistaken when he postulated that
because people behave just like animals in their eternal battle for survival, a powerful government is necessary to prevent an endless war
of all against all, and to ensure humanity the right to security and life
itself. Townsend sought to delegitimize this idea that a strong government protected rights by preserving social order for the common good.
In Polanyis formulation, for Hobbes, people were like beasts, and thus
needed a state to regulate them; for Townsend, people are beasts and
because they are driven by the same laws of nature as say, tigers and
gazelles, foxes and rabbits, no government was necessary. In using goats
and dogs as proxies for humans, Townsend thus slipped from the metaphor of likeness to a condition of being. In the wilds of nature there
exists no umpire.
The second accomplishment of social naturalism was to delegitimize
public philosophy and those social policies that appeal to the common
good, to social morality, to collective conscience or social compassion.
Social naturalism dictated only those policies designed to mimic the
brutalities of nature. By allowing the harshest of social conditions to
prevail, people would act on their biological instincts to survive. Poverty policy, for example, would no longer provide relief to the hungry;
instead, it would allow the natural condition of extreme hunger as an
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Polanyi especially admired the late nineteenth and early twentieth century English and German historical economists whose research forms
the backbone of GT (see pp. 269303 on his sources). In addition to
their holistic approach, the historical economists were distinguished by
their belief in inductive reasoning and empirical data collection. This put
them in intellectual and institutional conict with the mathematically
inclined marginalist economists. Polanyi embraced the institutionalism
of the English historical economists and the German historical school to
demonstrate the dangers that result from adhering to theories built not
on what real men and women actually do, but on theoretical models
based on a priori postulates about what human nature would dictate
they do. Polanyis allegiance to the reality of inductive reasoning challenged and served as a counterpoint to the dominant methods of political economy and economic liberalism, which adopted untestable and
nonempirical assumptions about human nature and market equilibrium
to justify their self-representations as true science (Somers 1990).
Paul Krugman has recently characterized the principles and practices
of modern economics as faith-based (2009b, 37). By this he means
economists place untestable economic logicjustied by a theology of
faith in presuppositions and assumptionsover and above years and
decades of historical and sociological evidence. Krugman, in fact, links
the economists failure to foresee the nancial crisis of 2008 to exactly
that kind of reasoning. As a group, he writes, they mistook beauty,
clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. He continues: [T]
he central cause of the professions failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists
a chance to show off their mathematical prowess ... this romanticized
and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all
the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations
of human rationality that often leads to bubbles and busts; ... to the
imperfections of markets ... that can cause the economys operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes(Krugman 2009b, 37).
Polanyis pursuit of reality as the foundation of knowledge is the
exact opposite of this hubristic approach. Indeed, it seems more than
likely that he would embrace wholeheartedly Krugmans aspirational
cure for his ailing discipline: [w]hats almost certain is that economists
will have to learn to live with messiness ... they will have to acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior, face
up to the often idiosyncratic imperfections of markets and accept that
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allies were not anarchists; they embraced the rule of law for guaranteeing property rights and enforcing contracts, even going so far as to
support the governments vigorous enforcement of anti-trust laws in the
interest of ensuring a competitive market.1 Beyond this minimum, however, Hayeks (2007 [1944]) most memorable declaration was that government involvement in the economy along the lines of Britains infant
welfare state would lead to nothing short of tyranny and serfdom.
Polanyis counterargument was that no human society can exist without the presence of power, especially governmental power to protect
society and its people from the most destructive aspects of market society, as well as to ensure the rights and liberties of which Hayek speaks so
eloquently. The economists utopian dream of a perfect society without
the exercise of power is the political expression of a story-book tale
more appropriate for Kiplings Just-So Stories . Like other utopias, however, it provides an appealing escape from the obvious social problems
and limitations of actual politics. Polanyi, by contrast, nds his solace in
the reality of society as the foundation of a humane public philosophy.
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to civil rights protections against the state. Polanyi fully endorses such
rights, but adds that rights of the citizen hitherto unacknowledged must
be added to the Bill of Rights, including the whole range of socio-economic rights from having a job to a decent education (GT, 264265).
Quite remarkably, and surely unbeknownst by the other, almost simultaneously FDR gave a too-little known speech advocating for a Second
Bill of Rights, also comprised of socioeconomic rights (Sunstein 2004).
For Polanyi, then, the maximum opportunity for real freedom can
come only through expansive socioeconomic rights, which are rmly
rooted in institutions. But for this to be accomplished in a durable fashion, people have to understand that the historical struggle to maximize
only the freedom of the individual from government is a dead end, for it
inevitably subverts the very social arrangements that are needed to provide us with real freedom. Polanyis faith in government is not nave optimism; after all, GT is an account of the defeat of democratic aspirations
by fascist and totalitarian governments. But it also is an account of the
survival of those aspirations over and against the formidable ideological
and institutional obstacles that have continually frustrated and blocked
them. That Polanyi still recognizes the necessity of government to secure
rights and freedoms rests on his belief in the capacity of human populations to exercise inuence and power over political institutions through
democratic self-governance. Indeed, these capacities for self-governance
are rooted in the same processes that make possible a complex division
of labor and high levels of social interdependence. Just as his belief that
people are social beings motivated not merely by economic interests but
by the values of social relationships makes him optimistic that even the
privileged can come to understand the desirability of his alternative view
of freedom, Polanyi believes that we are able to create solidaristic bonds
with each other for the purposes of achieving a wide variety of ends.
Despite his direct experience with the most brutal regimes, Polanyi
chose to believe that democratic potentialities are deeply rooted in the
noncontractual foundations of society. The ability to construct relationships based on deep reciprocity can be learned within family, intimate
life, and neighborhood, and this form of reciprocity often continues even
within modern political cultures that celebrate the sovereignty of the
individual. As an increasingly complex division of labor requires that
people acquire both more complex cognitive skills and a capacity to
question received wisdom, these new abilities have been joined with the
old to produce recurrent solidaristic initiatives to reshape society itself.
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that have been dominant for the last thirty years. Nevertheless in closing, we think there are several key insights from Polanyi that can illuminate our contemporary global condition.
First, social and economic thought about what needs to be done in
the aftermath of the 2008 global nancial crisis remains terribly impoverished. Conventional thinking has not yet even returned to the level of
insight that Keynes, Polanyi, and others attained in the 1940s. This is
exemplied in the single-minded and disastrous pursuit of public sector
austerity as a way to muddle through the continuing weakness of economies (Kuttner 2013). The lesson learned in the United States under
Herbert Hoover between 1929 and 1932 remains as relevant as ever;
in response to a global economic downturn, nations cannot recover by
slashing government spending and balancing budgets. The only solution
to what is a lack of adequate demand is to add demand to the global
economy, not to subtract it.
Not only are serious proposals for generating global demand glaringly
absent; Polanyis analysis of the crises of the 1930s also should alert us to
the urgency of reforming the governing rules of the global economy. The
policies and practices of organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization need
to be radically transformed to lay the foundation for a new period of
sustainable global economic growth. Moreover, the dollars central role
as the key global currency must be phased out and replaced by a global
mechanism that would provide the world economy with the expanding supply of money needed to sustain global demand (Block 2011a).
Among the key reforms of the global institutions would be a new regulatory regime that would bring the worlds largest nancial institutions
under far more rigorous control than has been so far accomplished. The
threat of a new nancial bubble that would again explode and endanger
the global economy is still present; radical reforms are needed so that
nancial activity is once again supporting the real economy rather than
undermining it in the pursuit of speculative prots. And yet global elites
appear to believe that just a little tinkering around the edges might be
sufficient to restore global prosperity.
The second charge we take from Polanyi is equally urgent: we must
resolutely call attention to how our obsolete market mentality with
respect to nature is a dangerous delusion that threatens the future of
the human species. Throughout this book we have emphasized the economic side of this argument, but it is also important to recognize the
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NOTES
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285
INDEX
288
Index
Index
economic imperialism, 56
economic liberalism: criticisms of, 228;
diffusion of, 147; embeddedness and,
80; ideology of, 5253; market liberalism and, 99; market self-regulation
and, 84, 233; political economy
and, 232; reality of society and, 224;
tradition of, 7; utopianism and, 150,
233234
economic orthodoxy, 2223, 96, 225
economic sociology, 155156
economic utopianism, 233234
economistic fallacy: critique of, 38,
4472; cultural disaster and, 6263;
obsolete market mentality and, 225;
views on, 7, 3031, 231
economy: always embedded economy,
910, 3134, 74, 7981, 9497, 105
107, 155, 219; autonomous economy,
3135; democratic politics and, 11,
2528, 4145, 220223; growth of,
12, 17, 23, 162, 207, 213, 222, 239;
human economy, 9, 26, 5960; as
instituted process, 2931; substantive
economy, 2930, 5960, 226, 241n5;
of today, 1819, 238240
Ellwood, David, 181
embedded economy: ambiguities of,
9197; autonomous economy and,
3134; cultural understanding of,
910; idea of, 7981; ideational
embeddedness, 9697. See also
economy
Engels, Friedrich, 8081, 98, 120121
English crisis, 158163
Equal Rights Amendment, 198
Esping-Andersen, Gosta, 195196
Essay on the Principle of Population,
38, 98, 119, 145, 148, 163171
Essence of Fascism, The, 47
Europe: nancial crisis in, 195198,
216217; free market conservatism
and, 194198, 205208; United
States and, 193, 195198, 217
Factory Acts, 14, 93
fascism: deationary policies and,
220221; global economy collapse
289
290
Index
Index
291
292
Index
Index
Oesterreschische Volkswirt, 46
Olasky, Marvin, 116, 180
Old Poor Law: analysis of, 77; labor
and, 83; policies of, 3638; poverty
and, 151, 159163; social policy and,
114149; Speenhamland and, 8788;
views of, 173, 176, 190. See also
New Poor Law
Old Testament, 234235
One Hundred Years Peace, 1115
opportunity structures, 6970
organizational autonomy, 199
Our Obsolete Market Mentality, 71,
95
Owen, Robert, 49, 100, 203, 235
Pearson, Harry, 47
Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunities Reconciliation Act
(PRWORA), 116, 148, 151, 155,
161, 180187
perversity thesis: causal mechanisms of,
158, 170171; ideational embeddedness and, 174177, 180183; logic
of, 142143; policies of, 103104,
116; population and, 163166;
poverty and, 157161, 171174,
177186; power of, 3739, 180185;
PRWORA and, 148, 151, 155, 161,
180187; social naturalism and, 158,
166169, 178, 184186; strength
of, 3739, 180185; TANF and,
190; theoretical realism and, 158,
166, 169171; welfare system and,
178180
Plough and the Pen, The, 48
Polanyi, Karl: alternatives of, 2528;
birth of, 45; concepts of, 811,
5865; contributions of, 6572;
countermovements and, 201204,
212; death of, 5, 4748; early years
of, 45, 4446; family of, 2829,
4546; on free market utopianism,
98113; on Great Transformation,
7397; ideas of, 143; inspiration
from, 24; as institutionalist, 2931;
introduction to, 18
Polanyi, Michael, 2829, 45
293
294
Index
Silver, Beverly, 15
Skidelsky, Robert, 2324
Smith, Adam, 8, 12, 59
Snell, K. D. M., 140
social arrangements, 30, 39, 4748,
5759, 98, 237
social classes, 44, 58, 6264
social democracy, 6, 220223, 238
social exclusion, 35, 196, 219
social naturalism: accomplishments
of, 229230; explanation of, 67,
3839, 102103; government policies
and, 103104; origins of, 102103,
228; perversity thesis and, 158,
166169, 178, 184186; pragmatic
institutionalism and, 173174;
self-regulating market and, 103104;
Speenhamland and, 117; understanding, 226230; utopianism and,
105106
social policy: debates on, 114, 117,
178179; differences in, 195198;
impact on, 120121, 142143;
mercantilist social policies, 162164;
modern social policy, 162; Old Poor
Law and, 114149; philosophy of,
99, 225229; Speenhamland and,
114115
social protection, 710, 5354, 6364,
71. See also protection
social safety net, 52, 110, 189
social security, 8, 160, 187, 208
social welfare, 2628, 126, 178, 195,
221222, 225
socialism: crisis of, 6; denition of,
2627; failures of, 81; ideals of, 34,
7172; impracticality of, 99100,
123; liberal socialism, 2426; transitions to, 5758, 7071; view of,
220225; working class and, 7680,
89; world market collapse and,
6772
society, meaning of, 225227
society, reality of, 11, 113, 218240.
See also reality of society
socioeconomic rights, 237238. See
also rights
Sokoll, Thomas, 136, 138
Index
295
296
Index
Waxman, Harry, 21
wealth inequality, 23, 20, 196197
Wealth of Nations, 168
Webb, Beatrice, 121122
Webb, Sidney, 121122
Weber, Max, 8, 27, 81
Welfare, 87, 116
welfare capitalism, 196
welfare debate, 150161, 178198
welfare dependency, 157, 178, 184
welfare legislation, 116, 184, 188, 192
welfare policies, 14, 116, 155157,
195196, 217, 225